


Skin and Sun

by Cheecho



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 05:04:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cheecho/pseuds/Cheecho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke only loses when it's personal. Forced to flee, she seeks refuge with an old friend of Merrill's. Fenris's past is once again a blank book, but as he gets older, the pit gets deeper. Smut, angst, redemption, and just enough plot for it all to hang together. Mostly F.Hawke/Fenris. Also Mahariel/(dead)Alistair and Carver/Merrill.  Complete, for now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Skin and Sun I

**Skin and Sun**

**34 Dragon**

**Kirkwall**

* * *

Fenris had needed to crack a second bottle for the courage to walk the few streets to Hawke's home. Danarius had never allowed Fenris to drink, and when Fenris drank now, he felt as little like the slave as he ever did.

She wasn't there. As his wait grew longer and longer, he wondered if she'd continued to Sundermount without him, but dismissed it as unlikely. She hated the cold desert nights, and going straight there would add another. More likely, she was at the Hanged Man, avoiding home. With an all-too-familiar jab of jealousy, Fenris wondered if the abomination was there. Once, before the incident with Alrik, he had heard Hawke tell the blonde man that he reminded her of her father. Fenris remembered the hopeful interest that had lit Anders's face. Fenris got up and paced around the dark foyer once more.

He had been waiting long enough that the buzz he'd needed to get here had worn off. With it went the assurance that his last caustic comment could be waved away. With sobriety, the dog in him returned, and he panted for Hawke's return, for her forgiveness, for her leadership. He sat back down and held the slight ache that was his head in his hands. He hated this return to himself.

The door opened. Hawke's white hair, mussed with sweat, glowed in the dim room.

"Fenris?"

He stood, barely wavering. His voice was even steadier, he was pleased to discover. "I came to apologize."

Hawke closed and barred the door, but before she could cross the foyer, he spoke again.

"I was unfair to you." He realized he was standing as Danarius had taught him to stand: hands clasped behind his back. He shifted, but felt more uncomfortable.

"You were angry," Hawke said, carefully. He was glad she was not moving to comfort him again.

"I am tired of being angry."

A pause passed between them. Fenris felt the urge to run, but he spoke instead.

"I do not believe that this needs stating, but magic has not ruined you."

"I know," she said, and she reached for him, comfortingly. "Nor you."

Her face paled in the sudden blue glow of his anger, and he pushed her against the hard stone of her walls. He wanted to shove her through the wall, to bang her head against it until she saw the ruin that magic had left him. The air rushed from her in a huff and he felt the pressure with which he was pressing her. "Do not comfort me, Hawke," he said. He let go and stepped back.

She did not move from the wall, did not look apologetic, and did not look scared.

"I do not wish to burden you," he said.

She reached for him a second time, fingers curling over his elbows. The lyrium there responded to the pull of her magic, but he stood against it. She stepped to him and he felt her warmth, felt her thighs shift against each other. Hawke was not a tall woman, and their mouths were almost of a level. She tilted her head, and all he had to do was close the space. He did not respond, restraint winning out against anger and fear and lust. He did not step away either.

"Burden me, Fenris," she breathed. He pushed her a second time against the wall, one hand pining her hands above her head. She whimpered slightly, and Fenris ran a hand from her elbow to her hip, fingers brushing the side of her breast. She squirmed exquisitely, but he did not kiss her. Fenris had no memory of kissing, but he liked having her trapped against him. Returning his hand to their joined hands, he leaned his full weight into her forearms. Her body lifted from the wall, pushing back against his. Her mouth approached his. He paused, unsure of himself. His grip on her wrists slackened and, in his hesitation, he felt Hawke break loose of him, felt her small hands on his shoulders, felt himself let her spin him, let her push him against the wall. Her mouth found his, and he opened it obediently. Her teeth closed over his bottom lip and her tongue swept the nerves at the edge of lip and skin. He felt her grind into his thigh, felt the uneven stone dig into his back. She smelled of the lyrium she'd drank in the Holding Caves, and its familiarity soothed him.

He wanted to please her. His hands found the bottom edge of her leather top and he skimmed his hands under it. The leggings were thin – he knew how thin they were from watching the sway of her hips. He wanted to please himself. She reached for his hair and forced his head to the side. She fell on his neck, and her mouth, hot and wet, traced the lyrium that curved over his windpipe. It was not painful, but it reminded him of unpleasant things, and the heart of his desire faded. Still, he turned his head to give her better access, and he stood motionless under her ministrations. Her breathing was uneven and she tugged at his clothing.

Upstairs, he felt himself fall into a rhythm. Hadriana had often woken him in his sleep, wet with the power she had over him, and it was her legs that he remembered when he pulled Hawke's bare thighs over his shoulders. Hawke's were stronger and shorter, but quivered in exactly the same way. He ran his hands from ankle to knee, from knee upwards. She was open before him, visibly swollen, and her hips arched in anticipation. Her head was thrown back onto the new, thick feather pillows of her bed. Her eyes were closed tightly, and her mouth a pout of delayed gratification. He wanted to please her, and he lowered his mouth to do so. She tasted as all women tasted: slick and sweet. He had put his mouth on many women while he belonged to Danarius. On Hadriana, who too had smelled of lyrium; on Danarius's guests, when they asked for him; on women who also belonged to Danarius, for his entertainment or the entertainment of others. At each woman, he had quickened, and he quickened now, but there was an earnest edge to his efforts. He wanted her moans as much as he wanted her release. He wanted her as much as he wanted to be free of her.

Under his mouth, he pushed a finger to her opening. She was so slick that it passed easily inside. He added a second finger, stretching and driving her. She panted his name and arched her hips, and he bent both fingers inside her. He felt her clench and unclench, and a small spurt of juice ran into his palm. He wrapped his free arm under her as she went slack, and carefully, gently, he lowered her back to the mattress. She sprawled there, spent. He knelt on her tall bed, watching the rise and fall of her breasts as she caught her breath. Tentatively, he reached to run the backs of his fingers against the side of one, just as he had done in her foyer. They were warm and soft, and the nipple shifted as he stroked her. He laid a hand around it, feeling her breath slow.

She sighed into his touch, and smilingly reached her arms towards him. Her fingers found his face and then his shoulders, and she pulled him down to her.

"Fenris," she sighed, happily. She reached up to touch her lips to his. She smelled of new sweat, and her lips seemed to cling to his. She lowered her head back onto the pillow and, looking up at him, shifted under him invitingly.

He did not speak or smile or kiss her back. Hesitatingly, he lowered himself between her open legs and took his weight onto his forearms, braced on either side of her prone body. Her legs parted further, thighs slipping over his hips, and she raised herself to meet him. He did not respond immediately, and she tilted her head to kiss him again. It was more urgent than her last lingering kiss, but he did not open his mouth to it. She lay back on the pillows and reached between them to guide him into her. He followed the urging of her hands, felt himself sink into warm and wet, and he lowered his head to her shoulder so that she could not reach his mouth.

He began to move in the rhythm that he liked best, the rhythm he'd used when Danarius commanded him to impregnate some other slave, rather than the slow build he'd use for women's pleasure. Hawke moved to meet him, thrust from thrust, and he felt her hands move over the muscles of his back. She scratched him lightly. She arched and thrust, and he reluctantly felt his end approach. He turned his head to see the contrast of his dark hand on her pale belly, and his nose moved over her shoulder. Her shoulder had been bare all day, and she smelled of sun and sweat. She turned her head and he felt her mouth close over his ear.

She smelled of sun and sweat.

He remembered another woman's skin, the sunlight angling through the paneless window across her bare shoulder, the hard clay under his knees. The sweetness of the urge that prompted him, the sweetness of her expression. He remembered the sweetness without remembering her face. Some band over his heart broke, and his eyes snapped open. Behind it was grief and guilt, as he had always known there would be.

He saw the glow of the fire Sandal had laid for his benefactress. He saw the light flicker over the brands on his arm. Cautiously, he opened his mouth and tasted Hawke's skin. She tasted of sweat, but it brought nothing back for him. He closed his eyes and his mouth and breathed in again. Sun and sweat and Hawke. Hawke, who was moving for him, who was, he noticed, saying his name. He turned to look at her face, and there was a sweetness there that had nothing to do with a woman who was bid to be with him or who had bid him be with her. He leaned his forehead against hers, and as she touched his face, he felt himself come undone. He kept his eyes on her face, and she pressed her mouth to his mouth, tightened her legs, and ran both hands down his back. She cupped his flexed buttocks, pulling him as deep as he would go, arching against his last, long push. She wanted it, wanted him. He closed his eyes against grief.


	2. Skin and Sun II

**Skin and Sun**

**18 Dragon**

**Tevinter**

* * *

She smelled of sun and sweat and clay.

Her eyes were closed, and her hair stuck to the skin of her face and neck in dark curls. He knew that she was not asleep, that she was just resting through the heat of the afternoon sun.

The air was the kind of thick heat that pressed down, that exhausted, that stopped sleep and turned food solid in the belly. It was the kind of hot that kept the boy – he was still a boy, but barely – from reaching for his girlfriend, laying prone an arm's reach away. He turned his head so that he could see her more clearly. The sun glared at the cracks between the hung fabric and the unpaned window. The fabric was an undyed cotton with flaws in its weave, and it was so covered in clay dust that it glowed orange.

The girl's skin was covered in fine layer of red dust. She glowed bronze under it, and the boy reached for her hand. Clay caked her fingers and packed under her nails. He held her hand between her head and the fabric above both their heads.

"They're the same colour," he said.

She turned her head to look and agreed with him, then she took her hand away. "It's too hot to touch," she said, sleepily.

"It is," he agreed. "But I still want to."

She turned onto her side, one hand tucked under her head. He was on his back, head turned towards her. The tips of his shaggy hair was visible, and he was startled to see that they were dark too, as dark as her hair. He reached out and traced a finger down the curve of her arm.

"It won't be hot forever," he said. Her arm met her breast, and he traced a finger lightly along the curve where it spilled, just slightly, out of her sleeveless top. "Tonight, for example, it will not be hot."

The girl's mouth curved upward. "That's true. Are you coming?"

"It would be my pleasure," he said, wagging his eyebrows at her. "But, sadly, I cannot."

He had been good. They had not done anything that could be later found out, but they had become familiar with each other's bodies and the pleasures that could be found in each. Remembering, the boy's blood rose, despite the sun. He reached a hand for her free one and brought it to his mouth.

She let him kiss each finger, but as he half-rose off the clay floor, she pulled her hand away. "It really is too hot," she said, and some small part of the boy, some part that was watching rather than doing, marveled, without knowing why, at the ease of her refusal and the undemanding way he had asked.

* * *

As the sun lowered, they left together for the brick pits. He usually spent the cool parts of the Tevinter summer days training, but an apprentice's spell had gone badly wrong, and the outer garden wall was compromised. Minrathous was too full of refugees to leave it was it was, so all the young slaves had been shipped to brick pits and put to work. In winter, the boy's training would be at an end. He would move into the house and he would not see the girl again. Remembering this, he reached for her hand. She let him hold it as they walked together. It was not possible to refuse his graduation or his move. Nor would it, in the long run, be helpful. Soon the girl would become a woman, and her duties would change too. He knew they would, and she knew they would, but they did not speak of it. In any other house, her duties would likely have already changed, but Danarius did not like women. His guests sometimes did, but she had been spared that so far.

They had today, though. The boy positioned himself so that he could watch her work. He enjoyed watching her. Her buttocks shifted under the thin cotton of her dress, which stuck to her thighs when she began to sweat. The boy saw many other boys watching her work, and he preened. She was, for as long as she could chose, his.

There were elves as well as human girls there, but the elven girls did not interest him. They did not curve as she curved, sway as she swayed. They would not, he imagined, shimmy under him like she did as he pleasured her with his fingers.

They worked until the dark made it impossible to work longer. Then the kilns were fired. The bricks would be baked by their light and heat, and the majority of the workers were let go for the night. The boy was to work the kiln tonight, which he hated, since it would take him from the girl. This was the last season of his freedom, and he chafed to lose a night, but he bent to his task and did not see the carriage pull up. The boy he was working with elbowed him, and he turned and saw, and his heart sank. An elf – one of the house slaves – stepped out, flanked by the boy's swordmaster and a woman he did not recognize. The elf's cold eyes ranged over the dirty, sweating bodies.

"Line," he barked. They lined as they were taught, with enough room between them that a man could walk comfortably. Boys on one side with their hands clasped behind their backs. Girls on the other, with their hands folded in front of them. The boy had found a spot near the back, and he glanced over at the girls' lines. She had not been so lucky and was in the second row. He moved his eyes back quickly, before the house elf noticed. The man moved to the boys' lines first, swordmaster in tow.

There was a lot of discussion, always, about how to get picked or not picked. The boy thought that this was silly, since they rarely knew what they were getting picked for. Still, the elf had a rushed glint in his eye that the boy did not trust. If he thought there was a way to get picked or not, he would have avoided it. The elf drew nearer. He stopped at someone that the boy did not recognize, examined him, then looked to the swordmaster.

"Not one of mine," said the master, and the boy relaxed.

The boy paid less attention to the elf after that. They were looking for boys who were not in training, and he would be safe. He knew very few of the other boys here, and so he did not care for them. Someone would have to go. Better someone that he did not care for. The elf stopped in front of him, took his chin in his hand, and turned his face from side to side. Still, the boy did not worry.

"This one," he said.

"Not that one," the swordmaster said.

The elf frowned. "He'd be perfect," he said, looking the boy up and down again. "Is he good?"

"The best," the swordmaster said. The boy could not help raising his eyes to the elf, one eyebrow raised. The elf backhanded him. "Don't smirk at me, boy!"

The boy arranged his face and got back into line, feeling triumphant. The feeling did not last. When the girl was chosen, she shot the boy a quick, terrified look, but he was powerless.

* * *

Near dawn, the boy went to their small hut. He would be excused from mixing the sand and clay for the morning shift and, hopefully, so would she. He waited, awake on the floor, as the sun lit the sky and the cracks of the window. It was very bright by the time she returned, face drawn. He sat up immediately, afraid to reach for her. She shook her head, her lips thin.

"I'm fine," she said. "But I'm sold."

He had always known that they could not belong to each other, but the immediacy rocked him. "When?"

"Tomorrow."

He did not reach for her, but she threw herself into his lap. His arms went around her. He had always known that they could not belong to each other, he reminded himself. He tucked her head under his chin, and they sat like that for a long time.

She spoke so softly that he did not hear her.

"What?" he asked, turning his face downward. Her hair had been piled onto the top of her head, but the ties were becoming loose, and one curl pushed itself into his mouth.

"I want you to be my first," she said.

The boy froze. This was also a thing that he wanted, very much, but it would be very bad for her when it was discovered. Very bad for him if they bothered to find out who had so lessened her value.

"They didn't talk about that," she said.

"They could be now."

"I don't care," she said. She pulled away from him, her tear-streaked face looking back into his. She did not smell of clay dust now. She was clean, though she smelled of sun and sweat, from her long ride in the uncovered wagon. They had not put black around her eyes. She did not need black around her large dark eyes. He kissed her, and she kissed him back with a ferocity, a defiance that would probably get her killed. He knew he was gone.

They had dance the first steps of this dance so many times that their bodies did it without their consent. He pulled her dress over her head and pushed his fingers inside her. She moaned and pulled his tunic over his head. She scratched, frantic, at his leggings, and he was forced to pull his mouth from hers long enough to peel them off. He sprang, ready, from them and her fingers were around him as they had gone around him a hundred times in the last month.

He made a second attempt to stop their folly, but she shifted under him and guided him with hands and hips. He had never done this before, but he knew exactly what to do. His mouth opened, so near her already open mouth. Something inside her gave, and she gasped in pain. They had pulled themselves back from this brink a hundred times, and so that they would never do this thing. They would never do it again. The boy went still, waiting. She breathed close to his mouth, and then, finally, she kissed him carefully. He kissed her again and he thrust, slowly, experimentally. She squirmed in the way he had felt her squirm a hundred times before. Her clean fingers pushed into his back, urging him. He thrust again and again, and then he lost count. He opened his eyes before he finished, sad that he did not know enough of how to please her this way, sad that he would never know, sad that he was dooming her to whipping or worse, sad that she would suffer so just for his pleasure. She still had two tear streaks down her face, but she smiled at him and touched his face, and he was lost in the sweetness of this first time.

* * *

Many years later, Fenris woke in a decrepit mansion. There was a bottle of wine, empty, near his bed. The dull Kirkwall sun was shining through the crack between the dusty velvet curtains and the tall window frames. He woke to grief and guilt and, as always, that sense of floundering in a story he did not know.


	3. Skin and Sun III

**Skin and Sun**

**34 Dragon**

**Vinmark Mountains**

* * *

Somewhere in the Vinmark Mountains, Hawke threw her bedroll to the ground in disgust. "I hate this Maker-damned place," she said, weariness radiating through her sun-burnt face. She turned to Fenris's bemused face.

There had only been a few weeks of discomfort between them. Fenris had turned the corner off the Hightown street that led only to the Rose. Not looking up, he had turned right into Hawke. Her lips had thinned, and she'd averted her eyes in hurt. Fenris had felt that he must, this one time, speak. He'd caught her elbow, and she neither turned away nor flinched.

"I am no cook," he'd said.

"If you can read, you can cook," Hawke said, repeating the rebuttal he'd often heard her mother offer her a thousand times. Then she'd blushed and looked at him with a hint of their earlier honesty. "Sorry."

He'd kept her gaze. "I prefer the Rose's stew to the Hanged Man's. There is no other enticement."

That was as close to a conversation on the topic as they'd gotten. The next night, he arrived at her estate in time for the evening meal, as he had often done in the past. Not one of Hawke's dependents commented on his absence or his returned presence. They ate, and then Hawke and Fenris retreated to the library. They spent their free evenings sitting so near each other that their upper arms brushed every time one reached to turn a page. Each brush of skin caused some inner beast to stir. He watched it stir. Some nights, when the wine was particularly good, or when he'd drank just the right about of it, he'd brush his lips over her fingers or, once, her cheek when they parted.

In short, they continued as they'd begun, but now Hawke hinted at nothing. He missed her hints, but he found he preferred the looks of tentative hope that sometimes softened her face. He was a fool, he knew.

At this moment, thought, there was nothing tentative about the expression of loathing on her fine-boned face.

"How has the climate wronged you now?"

Amusement flickered briefly. "I'm hot, I'm about to be cold, and my waterskin leaked onto my bedroll, so it's soaked and I have nothing to drink. I hate the desert."

This was, Fenris knew, no desert. A desert was hotter, drier, colder, and barer. In a desert, a man would kill for one of the sticks Merrill was loading into Carver's outstretched arms. Fenris passed her his own waterskin, still half-full. She sipped carefully and passed it back.

"Thanks."

"You are welcome." He knew his pleasantries were too formal, but they made her smile, so he persisted, even after hearing Isabella and Anders aping them to each other. He found a cathartic pleasure in willingly addressing her in the manner which he had once been forced to use with his master and his master's friends.

Hawke sighed and sat on her pack, resting head in hands and elbows on knees. She looked small and a little sad, and, as always, her vulnerability made him feel somehow exposed. The beast stretched. He kept his distance and his silence until it went back to sleep.

"Are you well?" he asked.

"Besides being hot and damp and about to be cold and damp?" She shrugged. "Alright."

He nodded and turned to attend to his own camp chores. He ought to have expected it. The Hawkes were both remarkably impervious to all they had learned of their father in the last ... however long it had been. He had stopped counting their breaks some time ago. From a flicker of Hawke's eye, he suspected that she had already known. He remembered what Anders had once said to him: to use blood magic, you had to look a demon in the eye and accept his offer.

He also remembered her telling Anders once that he reminded her of her father.

He glanced back at Hawke, who was inspecting her waterskin minutely, looking for the defect. Of her, he had experienced only a moment of discomfort. He had told himself that it had been her good training that made her magic safe. She had made him come to believe that there were some mages – at least one mage – that, properly trained, could live away from the circle. Under supervision. That she could, he was confident. He had seen her turn down demons and spirits alike. If her father and teacher had made deals with demons, there was no sense to it.

Fenris was not shook because he doubted Hawke. He was shook because he wanted nothing more than a new set of rules by which he could order his ideas, but everywhere he looked, there was chaos and contradiction.

The witch and the templar returned. Merrill was explaining how to start a fire without a flint.

"You don't just magic it?" the besotted man asked her.

Carver irritated him. What kind of templar blushingly asked a known blood mage – one who admitted to dealing with demons – for a drink at the Hanged Man? What kind of order wouldn't care if she had said yes and they'd been seen there together?

"We would need a short bow," Merrill said.

"We have one!" Carver exclaimed, and he fell to his skirted knees to dig one of the more worthless bows from their loot. Fenris glanced Hawke's way as he opened his mouth to protest. She shook her head, thin-lipped.

Carver found it, rose, and crossed again to Merrill, who was digging a groove into a flat piece of wood with the same knife that she used to slice her palm open. Carver knelt and watched her work.

"Thank you for showing me this," he said.

"It is a pleasure to share my people's knowledge," Merrill said. Carver beamed. She glanced at the bow in his hand. "Oh. That's Hawke's. Hawke, can we use this?"

"What makes it hers?" Carver asked, with his familiar edge of rivalry.

"Hawke is our leader," Merrill said.

Carver snorted.

"Go right ahead," Hawke said.

"It's no more hers than mine," Carver argued, but not even Merrill was listening.

Fenris stood, discomforted. He wanted distance. He wanted to not hear the witch's cloying blindness or Carver yip at Hawke. He wanted the solitary ramble of his own thoughts. Besides, they had not brought enough wood, and the sun would sink quickly. Freed from the weight of his pack, he covered the ground in long strong steps. This was not the desert, but Hawke was right when she complained that there was not a full hour of the day in which the temperature was pleasant. That portion of an hour was here, and Fenris enjoyed the cooling air on his still-warm skin. He had not gone more than twenty paces when he realized that he wanted to be free of Hawke as well. He had not gone fifty when he realized why. It was dark when he came back.

* * *

Fenris woke, the lyrium in his skin tugging at him. He sat up, looking about. Hawke was by the fire, coddling a small flame in her hands. Her borrowed bedroll – he could not tell if it was Merrill's or Carver's – was thinner than the one she usually used. Her bedroll was laid open by the fire, drying. The third was empty. Carver's, Fenris assumed, abandoned to keep the witch company. He was, at least, persistent.

He sat up. As the blanket fell, he realized that it was cold. Hawke, catching the movement in her peripheral vision, closed her fist around the tiny fireball in her hand. Fenris felt her mana wink out.

"Sorry," she said.

"It is no trouble."

Hawke pulled the blanket more tightly around her. The sky was a swirling mass of stars above them, the heat of the day rushing towards them. Fenris reached for the pile of wood and added another branch. It was so dry that it caught immediately.

"Carver will be tired tomorrow," he observed, dryly.

"We'll be in Kirkwall by the afternoon."

"Where he will have to hate mages again."

She smirked at him, the fire twinkling over her face. "We're hard to hate."

Fenris felt the corner of his mouth turn. "Is that why you brought them, then?"

"I asked him because they attacked him in his bed."

Fenris shifted. His bedroll was caught uncomfortably around him middle. He pulled it loose. "Come here, Hawke," he ordered, without looking at her. "Bring your blankets."

She got up and moved to him, but she did not sit down until Fenris took her hand and tugged her into his lap. As she sank towards him, he wrapped his blanket around them both. She curled into herself, and he tucked her head under his chin. She felt good there, right.

Grief, unbidden and un-understood, rose again. He watched it awhile, felt it shift and swirl with Hawke's breath.

"You don't want to know why I asked you to come?"

The fear flexed it claws, like a tiger. "Tell me then," he said, with forced lightness.

"I like your company best," she said, sounding pleased.

That was, Fenris thought, good to hear, even if he had already known it. Of the many things about Hawke that he was sure of, her loyalty was one. He had watched, alarmed but not surprised, as she brushed off the flirtations of others: Anders, then Isabella. It was around then that he'd caught them aping him, he remembered with satisfaction. He had come to her home more often after that, stayed later. Every time he knocked, she smiled and held her door open.

It seemed she could take the uncertainty of the future with patience.

"I have found another thing to admire about you, Hawke." He had spoken almost faster than he had thought, but he knew what he was going to say, and so he said it: "You do not fear the past."

She tried to move to face him.

"Humour me, and be still."

Obediently, she went very still. "Why fear it?"

"All men fear the things they do not know."

"I am not afraid of you."

"You are a fool." She knew nothing of the grief that broke him in the night, of the fear that clawed at him. She knew nothing of Tevinter or the things Tevinter took from its slaves, and he did not want her to ever know.

"I am not a fool." Hawke pulled against his embrace again, and he let her free. She twisted in his lap so she was facing him, her hand on his chest above his heart. Her mouth was so close to his that all he would have to do is lean forward. "Do not flinch," she said. He could feel her lips moving, they were were so close. He froze, waiting for the kiss. He owed it to her to accept it.

She did not move forward. He watched the fire flicker over her face in the cool high air. There was no passion in her face, just that tentative hope that soothed him. He leaned, and he touched his mouth very carefully to hers. The beast raised its head, and its gaze stopped him from tightening his arms, from leaning further. From arranging her legs on either side of him. He would not be unmanned before her again.

She did not deepen their light kiss. He hated and was grateful for her carefulness.

"I will keep you warm, if you like."

"Please," she said. He slid her down, arranged her body between his body and the fire. She warmed and softened and slept, and he breathed her in. When Merrill woke him for his watch, her bedroll was dry, and he draped it carefully over her.


	4. Interlude

**Interlude**

**37 Dragon**

**Thedas**

* * *

Isabella lay slumped in the far corner. Fenris had fallen after her, and his body draped over her exposed thigh. Hawke didn't have the time or the energy for jealousy. All her will was going into keeping her blood under her own control. She still had her mind, but her body was paralyzed between two opposing commands. In the end, the blood would out her will.

Danarius strode into her line of vision. He did not have a speck of blood on him, while Hawke was misted and splattered with her own, with her adversaries', with Fenris's and with Isabella's. The magister wiped imaginary dust from his sleeve before turning to face her. He took her chin in one hand and examined her face.

"I can see what the boy saw in you," he drawled. "If you like refugee trash."

Hawke said nothing, her discipline straining against the slowly rising tide of oblivion.

Danarius let her go and leaned backwards, watching her lose. "But no matter. He is mine again. He was happy with me for a long time, you know. I will make sure he is again."

"Haven't you ever heard the old saying?" Hawke ground out through her tightening jaw. Nothing below her heart was hers. "If you love something, let it free. If it comes back, it's yours."

Danarius laughed. "Oh, there is something about you, isn't there? Not quite worth your reputation, but there is something lovely there. My wolf always had good taste. It's too bad you weren't mine before. I am a very persuasive man. Now you're too dangerous to live, of course. Sorry."

"Wait," Anders called from the corner. His voice cracked with exhaustion, but it had that unreasonable edge to it that Hawke had seen more and more often. Her panic rose, bringing the blackness.

* * *

Hawke woke in the clinic, hurting in and out. She shot up in her cot.

"Anders?" she called. Sun was coming in the small high windows and the stink of Darktown was at its midday high. "Anders!"

Varric walked quickly to her side. "Easy, Hawke," he said, in the tone he used for everything from "Bartrand's back" to "Want another?"

"Varric! Where's Fenris?"

The dwarf did not look her in the face when he answered. "The slaver got him. They sailed yesterday."

"Isabella?"

Varric looked away. "Blondie said that there was no blood left in her."

Hawke felt a faint ringing: the kind of quiet that followed a smite. So that she did not have to think about Isabella's exposed thigh, bloodless, under the body of her stolen lover, she asked where Anders was. Coldly. Varric argued with her for a while. There was nothing he could have done. The fight was lost. He'd saved Hawke's life. Saved Varric's life. Background sounds slowly returned to Hawke. All was not lost. She had fought before and she would fight again. All was not lost. Hawke had only lost, irredeemably, twice in her life. Her throat closed. What would Fenris have to offer her in the way of comfort now?

"Where is Anders?"

"Hawke," Varric started, but he was interrupted by the door swinging open. It hit the clinic wall with a bang. Anders strode through, walking recklessly. He was still wearing the ridiculous black feathered coat that he'd taken to wearing months ago. It did not suit him. He looked pale. Hawke had thought so when he'd first showed up in it, and she thought so now. His eyes flittered restlessly around the room.

Hawke stood, taking her father's staff from where it leaned against her cot. As always, it whispered to her blood as she picked it up. As always, she shuddered a little at its touch. She hated the staff, hated it even more now that she had felt the way that her blood could turn so entirely against her. Fenris – her throat closed a little – Fenris had thought it was a mistake to continue using it. She decided that she would destroy it as soon as she could.

Anders made as if to cross the room to her, to press a hand to her shoulder and guide her gently back onto the cot, but as soon as Hawke took a ready grip on her father's staff, he stopped.

"Do you know why I asked you to help, Anders?"

The mage said nothing.

"I had hoped," Hawke continued, the emphasis on the last word, "that you might benefit from seeing a magister and an unrestrained blood mage. I though it might help fill some of those holes in your damn manifesto."

The pale mage licked his thin lips.

"I had hoped that you might see how mages, too, could go too far. Did it work?"

Anders continued his cycle of small motions: shifting from foot to foot; eyes never resting on a single object; tongue to lips; hands to hips; hands let loose. Hawke wondered if he had always been like this, or if it was the thing inside him that kept him in motion. A boy appeared, anxious-faced, at the door, but Hawke did not turn. Varric left her side.

"Did it work?" she asked, again.

"What about making him see?"

Hawke smashed him across the face with the four claws of her father's staff.

He held a hand to his face, blushing pink already, but he did not heal himself.

"I never want to see you again, Anders."

Anders's mouth twitched, but it was too fast an expression for Hawke to read. Varric reappeared, saying her name in that unreadable tone.

"What?"

"Orsino and Meredith are going at it again in Lowtown. Orsino is asking for your help."

Hawke did not care at all for either of them. She was reminded, suddenly, of Dumont, grieving for his dead son while she battled the Qunari before the ashes of her mother were cool. Hawke had a ship to prepare and a magister to kill. She would lose no more. "Fuck them," she said.

"Meredith is accusing Orsino of harbouring blood mages."

"He is harbouring blood mages."

"They are not all blood mages!" Anders squealed. Hawke refused to look in his direction.

Varric stepped closer to Hawke and dropped his voice to a whisper, so that Anders could not hear them. "My templar contact says that she's asked Elthina for the Right."

Hawke was caught by the immediacy: Orsino was a snake, but all those people... The mages and the apprentices. Then she let out a long, high noise of rage. Once, just once, she wanted to be free to tend to herself. Varric rocked back a little, and there a new expression in his face when he looked at her. She buried her face in her hands and drew three long, shaky breaths.

A moment passed, and then he touched her shoulder. "We'll get him, Hawke."

Hawke ignored the comfort in his tone. "Varric," she said, steely Hawke again. "Get Isabella's crew and tell them to make ready to sail. I'm going to my estate. I'll stop at Lowtown on the way to the Docks. I'll be there in an hour. Be ready."

Varric nodded that half-nod that looked for all the world like a salute, and he left for the Docks.

Hawke took a breath. She would stop for Merrill on the way. The elven woman was lost after her Clan's demise, and Hawke would not leave her behind. Isabella... her heart missed another beat on Isabella. She righted herself. Regrets were for when you had time. She turned out of Anders's clinic for the last time and stormed towards the locked passage to her cellar, already making an inventory of the things she would take. Hawke was not a sentimental woman, and she planned to take only things that were very small and very valuable. She would hate to leave would be the books, but she'd come back for them.

In her haste and her anger, in her rising worry and her suppressed grief, she took no notice of Anders's last openly triumphant look. If she had, she probably would have killed him there, rather than twenty minutes later.

* * *

The prow of Isabela's ship broke through the Waking Sea, and Merrill was leaning over the front railing, watching the waves crest. She knew nothing of the sea, but she liked the smooth glide of the ship and the tight discipline under Isabela's first mate. She heard Carver's heavy tread on the deck behind her, but the feel of the breeze on her face was too sweet to turn from. Apparently, he agreed with her, as he took a spot very near her, crossing his arms on the rail and leaning into the wind along with her.

"Isabela was right," he said. "Being the deck is much, much better than the hold."

Merrill felt two pricks of tears at the outer corners of her eyes. One fell, and she did not wipe it away. Grief, she thought, was sweeter when there was no guilt with it. Poor Isabela.

Carver saw her tear and gathered her into his arms very gently. Merrill leaned into him, grateful for his soothing manner. Grateful that he'd never stopped being soothing towards her, no matter her crimes. His arms were not entirely comfortable, because of the metal, so she pulled back. Carver's expression was very tender, and she smiled at him. There was so little left of even this strange Clan. Hawke's Clan.

"How's Hawke?" she asked.

"Resting."

"That's good, right?" she asked, but didn't wait for a response. "She wanted to go to Minrathous. How long will it take to get there, do you think?"

"Merrill," Carver said, glancing around them. None of the crew was near. "I don't think we can get to Minrathous. The crew saw the explosion, and they saw the fight, and they saw a mage and a templar carry another mage onto their boat before Meredith's body was cool. I'm surprised Varric talked them into launching."

"Varric's not here now."

"Exactly." Merrill bit her lip, and Carver pressed on. "I give us three days at sea, and no longer than half a day at port – any port – before they turn on us."

"We can't get to Minrathous in three days," Merrill said. Then: "Oh. Hawke will be angry."

"Better angry than dead," Carver said, with a strange tone that Merrill could not understand the implications of. Humans were often very bewildering to her. "We have to get off soon."

"We could look for Mahariel," Merrill suggested. "She's in Fereldan."

"The Mahariel? The Champion of Redcliffe? The elf who helped the Hero of Fereldan kill the archdemon?" Carver said incredulously. "No one has seen her in years. She could be anywhere in Thedas by now."

"Anders knew where she was planning on going and how she was planning on staying hid," Carver's jaw clenched at the man's name, and he leaned back on the railing, away from her. His short black hair blew boyishly in the wind. "He told me yesterday. I am sure that I could find her," Merrill continued. "I would really like to do that. She will help us, I am sure."

"Anders, the unstable abomination, knew this whole time where she was and that you wanted to find her, and you didn't think it was odd when he finally mentioned it yesterday?"

Merrill blinked and said no, entirely without guile.

Carver nearly slapped himself in the forehead in frustration. "Okay," he said. It didn't matter anymore. "Where is she?"

* * *

In the end, they did not make it to the port at Harper's Cove. Carver overheard grumbling as he passed the barracks on his way to the captain's cabin, which he was sharing with Merrill and his sister.

That night, he woke them both. Gos was aware, but weak. She didn't have the will to cast, and as Merrill knew nothing of healing, Gos's recovery would take time.

Carver worried over her. She had not spoken much in the last thirty-six hours, and Merrill could not give him a satisfyingly clear account of what had happened to Fenris or at the Gallows before he'd gotten there with Cullen. He knew, from a chance comment by Varric, that the sword that had nearly made two of Gos had been made of lyrium. He worried over the effect of the lyrium on his sister.  _Take care of Bethany. Keep Bethany safe._  It had not been until yesterday that Carver had ever wondered why it had only been Bethany in the family mantra.

Gos had an imperviousness about her, certainly. When he'd been a boy, he had always thought that it was because she was older, and that the same thing would happen to him in two years, but he'd never seemed to catch up to her. He'd never grown that impressive immunity to the slights or threats of others, to the challenges that their father's death or the Blight brought, when they came. Or the Quanari. He was not his sister.

After Bethany died, he never thought to look after Gos. Her magic was different than Bethany's. Sweet Bethany had brought home all the broken things she could find – birds with bent wings, dogs so covered in mange that they cringed when you touched them, and once, an orphaned fawn. Bethany healed them all in the quiet dark of the kitchen while Gos stood in the wild rain, hoping for lightning to cover her practice.

Carver wished that Bethany were here now. He had often missed and wished for his twin. Her life had begun almost exactly with his, and it still felt odd that he continued breathing after she was not. Today, he wished it for Gos. There was nothing impervious about Gos as he lowered her by rope to the small wooden rowboat that would be their getaway. Merrill was already there, and she helped Gos to a seat.

Carver had stolen civilian clothes for himself and for his sister. Their armour was bundled together near Merrill's feet on the floor of the boat. Once they were away, he would drop it into the ocean. It was too distinctive for them to wear or sell and too distinctive to leave behind. He hoped that without proof, the crew's claim might get lost in the hundred other claims that he knew would surface.

Still. Half of Kirkwall had watched him cross the Gallows courtyard from Cullen's side to pick up the broken, still-breathing body of his sister and board the boat.

Still. She was the second chance to keep the promise he'd made to his father.

Gos reached the bottom of the boat, and Merrill helped her to her seat. Carver glanced once more around the deck, then he shimmied down the rope himself. He left it hanging – the missing boat would be proof enough – and cut the rowboat down. It was not far to the water, and it landed with a quiet splash. The night was calm and bright, and he fit the heavy oars into their rests. He could get them to shore. He hoped Merrill could get them to the Brecilian.

* * *

Lina Mahariel did not, at first, recognize the elf wandering so near the village she'd established deep in the Brecilian. She had no reason to recognize the two humans with her – one a broken, limping white-haired mage, the other a broad strong man. The man half-carried the woman, and the elf carried two staffs and a sword.

It had not been until the man called for a break and the elf offered to start lunch that Mahariel recognized the lilting voice of the woman who had been First in the Clan she'd resented for the entirely of her adolescence. Mahariel was as tall, broad, and muscled as most human women, which made her taller and broader than most elven men. While she'd known that the children of elves and humans were always human, she had often wondered if there hadn't been enough elf in the man who raped her mother to make her just elf enough. Her mother's suicide after her birth and Mahariel's sense being out of place in the Clan that her father had once led had not helped. Any other hunter would have hated Duncan, despite the rescue he offered, but Mahariel had only had to keep her relief and hope to herself. She had walked gladly with Duncan to a chance at a larger life.

So when she recognized Merrill in her remote forest, she was not entirely pleased. But Bastard's End turned aside no one who needed help, and this group of ragged three obviously did. Mahariel stepped out of the trees, bow in hand, sword on back, and led them to the village.

Merrill had stayed, of course. She had nowhere else to go, and even if Mahariel had not been in desperate need of help, she would not have turned her Clans-kin away.

The man – the brother of the Champion – was made immediate welcome. He was not as skilled with his sword as Mahariel was with hers, but he was at least as good as the Sten had been, and she was grateful for the support. She was also grateful for the presence of a human man with enough self-assurance to look merchants and intruders in the eye. Her group was mostly women, elves, children, and barely trained hedge-mages. Mahariel could command the respect of those she met, but she was one of the few.

The Champion herself was a wreck. She had been wounded badly with a lyrium sword, and Carver worried that the combination of another man's smite, the lyrium, and the dwindle of the Champion's own mana had been a near enough approximation of the Rite that she would be lost. Mahariel had never refused a charity case and she would not start now. She had one apostate – a young blonde boy that had run away from Denerim when he'd heard his mother planning to send for the templars – that seemed to have a knack for healing, and he had done what he could. Slowly, the Champion had recovered.

Once she had, Mahariel was glad for her help. Of all the mages she had ever known, only Morrigan – lost Morrigan, fled in anger from Redcliff Castle – could have rivaled her. Like Mahariel, Hawke had facial tattoos, and like Mahariel, most of Thedas had an opinion about her. Unlike Mahariel, she could not be mistaken for any Dalish woman, and other humans would see her for who she was, even this far south. Hawke stayed in the forest, training the hedge mages and the apostates and the magical children that flocked in. She kept the ruins clear of the spirits that forced their way through the forest's tattered veil and fought the bandits who braved the forest in chase of the rumors. This left Mahariel free for the mercenary work that keep the village fed and clothed.

Carver became Mahariel's right-hand man. At first, his whole-hearted obedience and admiration reminded Mahariel of another young templar. At least, it had until she discovered his anger – boiling, covered, immature. Merrill was welcome to him. The three fought together and traded the goods Bastard's End could produce for the things it couldn't. The village grew, populated by the yellow-eyed Wolf family, the little-skilled Denerim elves, the Lothering refugees too poor to afford passage away, apostates, broken soldiers, and the mercenaries who helped keep it running. Mahariel could have been proud, but she felt that she had much to make up for. In time, she found that Hawke best understood her urge to amend.

The world was not made in a day, and it would take the better part of three years to come apart. Fereldan was least touched by the brewing war, but Fereldan hadn't had its own circle since the Blight. The Circles of other countries fell and were annulled, and shiploads of people arrived in Gwaren, filling the gaps the Blight had left in the population. Almost as soon as she'd arrived, Hawke was the name on everyone's lips and the face on all the pamphlets, and so the Champion stayed at Bastard's End.


	5. Glass Man

**Glass Man**

**40 Dragon**

**Gwaren**

* * *

Mahariel was walking in the front of the line, a bow over her back. Bows were not her weapon of choice, but she was not a Dalish hunter for nothing, and it was the weapon most humans expected a Dalish to wield. She got too many questions if she wore her greatsword outside the forest, and she had long since stopped feeling naked without it. She had a dagger down her boot, and her sword was hidden on the wagon, concealed under sacks of carded wool. She was dressed in dyed leathers: leggings and tunic. She never fought anything these days that required her to wear anything less flimsy, and the clothing was also a concession humans' expectations.

She glanced backwards. Carver was walking on one side of the wagons. Kern, a pickpocket who'd shown up at Bastard's End with his mage sister a few years ago, and one of the younger Wolf women, were on the other. She had still been a girl when she had become human, and while she had adapted more readily to her new form than her elders, she was only a fair fighter. Merrill was walking near Carver. Mahariel frowned. It'd be better to spread their strength. Still, they were near enough Gwaren that the Queen's seneschal would have men on the road. They ought to be safe enough.

They made it to the gates without incident, and Carver paid the entrance fee from the money purse Mahariel had given him in the morning. It raised the fewest questions if she seemed a mercenary under his command. She had instructed him to sell the wool and buy more spindles. She had labour and wool and sheep enough.

Gwaren was the dirtiest city Mahariel had even been in. It had two exports: fish and coal. It smelled of salt and rotting fish, and a fine layer of black dust covered the people, the streets, the buildings, and the fish. It was a grey day, and the humidity made it more squalid that it usually was. These days, it seemed to only have one import: refugees. Mahariel left Carver amidst the press of humanity all haggling in the market. The rest of her party scattered for this rare opportunity to spend their personal coin. The Wolf girl looked back at Mahariel, but when the elf would not meet her eye, she slunk after the mercenaries. Mahariel was blissfully alone. She left the market behind and walked deeper into the city, where the largest of the Gwaren homes were built. Mahariel shifted her bow on her back. She felt safe, but out of place, in human cities. It was her lot to feel always out of place, she thought.

She followed a long street to the small park and the bench where she liked to wait. The bench was at the edge of a small precipice, overlooking the ocean and far from the stink of the market and the docks. In Gwaren, she was rarely pestered for attention or decisions, and the freedom to pass the time idly was precious to her.

Gwaren was one corner of Fereldan that she had not travelled to during the Blight, so she found it strange that she thought of her lost lover most clearly here. They had loved each other on the mossy ground of the Brecilian forest, but by now she had walked over the same spot so many times that it only rarely brought a flash of memory. In Gwaren, she could give free rein to her thoughts, and it was the streets of her memory that got the majority of her attention, rather than the streets she trod.

She turned the corner to the small grassy area that passed for a park and was brought up short. Someone was already there. The ground fell away before his outstretched feet. A long, fine sword lay over his lap. It was not as fine as her Starfang, but nearly.

Annoyed, Mahariel turned to walk away, not sure where she should go now. The man turned, and Mahariel was startled to see that it was an elf. A tall, handsome elf, no longer in his youth. He was taller than she was, dark skinned and white-haired. His vallaslin markings were broad and stopped at his chin. Mahariel did not recognize them, then she recognized that they were not vallaslin, but lyrium. He saw her looking at them and his face darkened in anger.

She nodded at him. "I apologize for staring."

He relaxed slightly at the courtesy and stood to leave. The white markings ran over his arms in undulating loops, but Mahariel was watching his body rather than their curve. There was a lean strength and easy grace in the way he moved, and Mahariel could see that he was a fine fighter. He looked at her as he passed, took in the bow and her body, the way she stood. "You are no archer," he said. His voice was low and husky.

She raised an eyebrow, trying to place his strange accent. "No?"

"Perhaps you can shoot a bow, but you fight differently."

She took in his fine sword and the impressively well-fitting armour. "You are no common refugee."

"No."

"What brings you to Fereldan?"

"I come for the same thing that everyone who comes to Fereldan. Stability and," he hesitated. "A place to begin again."

Mahariel did not press him. "I specialize in new beginnings. We take those who need help and those who can offer it. You look like the latter."

"I bet you get more of the former."

She smiled, despite herself. "Yes, well. You'd be right. Blight. Templar war. Half the mercenary spoils go to support our village and the other half is split evenly. We do Chantry board work, guard work, and are the occasional help to the Teyrna's guards. Also, we live in a haunted forest."

One small corner of his mouth turned upwards, but he hesitated again, eyes flicking uncertainly.

"If you do not like it, you can leave."

He looked back over his shoulder to the wide ocean. From this distance, its waves were enormous in width and impressively shallow in depth. "I admit that I am at a loss. There are not many offers for an elf here."

"You would be welcome to me." Mahariel held out her hand to him, and he touched it very briefly. "My people will come for me here, if you wish to wait."

He inclined his head, and sat down again, far to the side.

She sat beside him, and they waited in silence. Mahariel was unused to a man who could hold his tongue, but after a few moments of self-conscious searching for a topic, she gave up and found the silence between her and this brooding man more comfortable than she'd have thought. She smiled to herself, remembering when she had been alarmed and angry at the constant chatter of her new, non-Dalish companions. Of one new, non-Dalish companion in particular. The memory of Alistair no longer stung. It was a companion to her, and even if it not as real as he had once been, the memory seemed to be a living thing, and more hers than he could ever have been.

To her surprise, the man spoke. "I find the sea very soothing."

"Why is that?" she asked. There was no trick to getting people to open up, whatever Alistair had said. You just asked a question, listened to the answer, and were kind.

The man was silent for a moment. "It is very large," he said. "And utterly unknowable."

Before Mahariel could frame a second question for him, she heard Carver's heavy tread and Merrill's light one. The tall elf turned as she did, and as he saw Merrill's long staff, he tensed, swore softly in a language Mahariel did not know, and shot upright.

"You have a viper in your midst," he said, accusingly. Mahariel raised an eyebrow, and the dark man raged on. "Why must magic follow me everywhere I go? I refuse to be party to it again."

Carver and Merrill froze. Merrill's face crumpled in relief and disbelief but not, Mahariel saw, offense. "Fenris?" Merrill said.

He turned to her, stunned and afraid. "How do you know that name, witch?" he spat.

"Good to see some things never change," Carver said, caustically.

* * *

Fenris could not resist the warrior's offer, despite the witch. His past scared him, but the slosh of amnesia was unbearable. It moved as he moved, pulling him off-balance, causing him to say ridiculously vulnerable things to the first person he met that spoke to him normally, that did not stare.

He was sick of the stares and he wished he'd found himself in some other place. Some place where he had a place. Since Danarius's death, the only place where he'd felt close to comfortable was on the ship here. He'd been lucky, he knew, to find paid work on a ship out of Tevinter as quickly as he had. While he'd sailed, he'd known what was expected of him. Stay out of the way, unless they were attacked, then to be very much in the way. It was a role he was familiar with, and they had not been attacked.

This elf warrior also seemed to know what she wanted from him, so he hefted his sword onto his back and followed her though the city gates. He thought he could follow her. There was a steadiness about her gaze that grounded him.

To his absolute disgust, the witch trotted up to him as soon as they were clear of the city gates.

"Do you really remember nothing? Not even Hawke?"

His stomach sloshed uncomfortably – a ruin of vague feeling – but he couldn't tell if he were sick because he remembered something or because this woman expected him to and he couldn't. When he peered at his past, all that peered back were dark waves. They moved, but he didn't know what moved them. "No," was all he said.

She had come far enough ahead that he could see her face – her pretty open face – as her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Fenris."

His hand shot forward of its own accord, grasping her wrist. He could feel all the small bones of her hand, as fragile as a bird, and her mouth opened in shock at the strength of his grip. He looked her full in the eye. Her green eyes flicked between his, searching. He did not know if she found what she was searching for, and he didn't care. He felt nothing more for her than he felt for all mages, for all pitying women everywhere. He dropped her hand and sped up to walk again by the warrior elf. He hoped that the warrior would not pry or pester.

She did not, and she did not cover his head as they turned off the main road to her camp. Fenris felt the soft pitying eyes of the witch on him all the way, but the one time he glanced backwards, all he saw was the dark-haired human warrior watching him. The man did not turn away from Fenris's gaze, and his eyes did not fill with fear or titillation or pity. They hardened, and Fenris looked away, as if he had done wrong. He stepped up to the elf warrior, feeling a fool and a coward.

The second day after they left the road, Fenris understood why the blindfold was unnecessary. Their path wove between trees, crossed streams at places that seemed deep, but weren't, disappeared entirely, looped back on itself, and was generally impossible to follow. Fenris had no memory of being in a place so thickly vegetative or where water flowed so abundantly, but he did not seem to be the only lost mercenary in the group. Only the two elves seemed to know the way.

"You are well-hidden," Fenris said to the warrior.

"We are," she affirmed. A pause. "There are some of us who would not wish to be found."

"More mages," he said, unquestioningly.

"Not only them." She shot him a sideways look. "Merrill says that I can trust you."

His heart sloshed. He had no idea if this was true or not, so he went for a dry joke. "You can trust me not to lead anyone back." Then he realized that he was trapped. "Or even that I will leave."

The woman turned her eyes away from him, as she done at the ocean. "You can always leave. Just say the word."

He said nothing in return, and she did not speak again.

They had not walked much further in when a mabari burst from the trees and threw himself enthusiastically around the warrior's legs. She shook his skin and roughed him up. He snapped at the air around her hands.

"The breed originates from Tevinter," he offered. "They defected from the magisters, preferring the barbarians they were bred to kill. I understood that they are highly valued here. I wonder how an elf comes by one."

The elf straightened up, and the mabari immediately assumed a more obedient posture. She smiled from the corner of her mouth. "Was that a question, Fenris?"

He shifted uncomfortably.

"I thought so. We were both survivors of Ostagar." She resumed her four-mile gait in the direction they'd been going. "We're nearly there," she said over her shoulder.

The mabari regarded Fenris, sniffed the hand he offered, wagged his stump tail, and then turned to follow his mistress.

The village was better than he had suspected. Strange buildings – half-hut, half-tent – had been built in strange formations. Some were built so closely together to one another that a person need not step outside to travel from one to another. There were many elves and many children. All seemed clean. All seemed well-fed.

On one side of the clearing, a longer, taller building rose above the rest. At its door, a human woman about Fenris's own height was standing beside a yellow-haired blonde adolescent, correcting a motion of his arms. Both were dressed plainly and neither held a staff, so it was not until a small spark of electricity shot from the boy's hands that Fenris saw them for what they were. The boy looked back at his teacher with unmistakable pride. She smiled back. The elf warrior turned and saw Fenris watching them.

"That's Gos Hawke, Champion of Kirkwall."

As if she'd heard them, the woman turned. Her hair was as white as Fenris's, despite her youth, and her eyes were strange – a green so light they were almost yellow. They widened when they saw him, and both hands went to cover her mouth. It was true then, what Danarius had told him. He had run from one magister's bed and bidding to another's. A cold hand of forgotten memory, of icy shame, reached for his heart.

Fenris felt the warrior watch him, felt the elf witch, and the human witch, and the man. Others in the clearing stopping what they were doing, drawn by all the silent watching. He felt trapped by their expectations and their observation. He had nothing to offer their eager eyes, and no place from which he could watch for his own reaction. He turned and he walked away, into the trees.

* * *

As near as Fenris could tell, there was little organizational structure or formal command in the village. Mahariel held more coin than anyone else. She backed the small store that the Denerim elf – Fenris could not remember his name – ran. Mahariel owned all the village looms and the majority of the livestock, but she seemed to expect no particular return on her investments. Fenris supposed she must be a very wealthy woman. She paid Hawke for her teaching, paid the guards who patrolled the forest, and gave money to the children who chose to leave when they grew up. Bastard's End had no taxes, but no peasant would grow rich here either.

Except the mercenaries. Tevinter was not a country known for its warriors, but Fenris was the best he had come across there, and Mahariel put him to shame. A small company, led by her, could take on tasks whole squads of trained soldiers could not. Fenris had never been so impressed. Mahariel seemed interested in the small pieces of his history that he remembered, but she revealed nothing of herself. Often, Fenris would retire realizing that they'd spent a whole evening speaking only of him or of nothing at all. Mahariel was a hero amoung them – the village was held together by the might of her arm and the force of her personality, but she was no mother, no lover. She seemed hardly a friend, except to her greying mabari, but when she disappeared for days into the forest, she left him behind. Fenris adored her in the blind way that a stray adores the first person that doesn't kick him: fearfully, hopefully, and with half a snarl in every expression.

Once, she returned from one of her solo disappearances, not with a deer or brace of pheasants, but with a grim expression.

"Fenris," she called.

He went to her immediately, and they retreated from curious ears.

"There are Tevinters in Gwaren."

He searched her face for anger or condemnation, but he could read nothing in it.

"It is no trouble," Mahariel said. "There are templars there too, and I like to keep tabs on what's happening. I will take a team."

"Templars are common in Fereldan, are they not?"

"Most have been called back to Andoral's Reach."

"Ah," Fenris said. Even he had heard of the mages' resistance, set at the border between Orlais and Tevinter. If it had not been so close to his home country, he might have been tempted to go there and help prevent a second Tevinter. "Can I be of assistance?"

"No. You're staying hidden, at least until they're gone. I need you to leave Bastard's End for a fortnight. We're difficult to find, but not impossible. People have left over the years, and I trust only most of them. Take Hawke. I don't want her found either."

Fenris felt a flip of fear. Fool, he told himself. She is only a woman, with no hold over you. "Where would you have me go?" he asked, with as little resentment as he could manage.

"The ruins. They are due for a cleaning regardless." He raised an eyebrow. "Spiders, skeletons, spirits," she said. "Nothing you can't manage. Hawke has her own mabari and all the traps were disarmed years ago."

"I would prefer some other assignment." It was not Hawke's magic that Fenris feared. He had seen enough to be assured that she used neither blood nor spirit, and the mages she taught seemed properly cognizant of the dangers.

"It is one thing to not seek her out," Mahariel said quietly. "But you're going."

In the moment of his surprise, she walked away.

Fenris paid his copper for the bowl of lamb stew and retreated to a far edge of the village's clearing, out of sight. He was uncomfortable amoung people. No one asked him anymore about his past, of which he could remember only the last three years, but he felt adrift and without context in the shift of their talk. Stories were told, but the connected understanding of feeling was inaccessible for the elf. It was as if he were a child, Fenris thought bitterly. Ignorant. He stirred his stew savagely, blowing on the carrots.

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" he heard the witch's voice through the trees. "You can talk."

"He's made it pretty clear that he has nothing to say to me." This was the first Fenris had heard Hawke speak without the audience of eyes. He peered inward, looking for a shape in the dark. Things shifted and stirred, but formlessly.

The man – the witch's lover and the Champion's brother – spoke in his condescending tone. "Well, then you establish that once and for all and move on from all this unresolvedness."

"Yes, Carver," Hawke said, bitingly. "We all know you're the expert in love now. Well done."

He snorted. "Letting him kiss your knuckles for three years is not love, Gos. Grow up."

The witch said something low that Fenris could not hear. Hawke responded in the same low tone, and the women moved on. Carver snorted again and stomped back to the buildings.


	6. Darkly

**Darkly**

**40 Dragon**

**Brecilian Forest**

* * *

Hawke did not look Fenris in the eye as they left Bastard's End. She just shouldered her over-large staff and skulked away towards the ruins. Fenris bit back his annoyance – mabari or not, the proper place for a mage was in the back. It was simple tactics, he added to himself.

The mabari seemed to know and remember Fenris, and he raced happily between them, oblivious to the silence. Hawke glanced over her shoulder and saw Fenris scratching the dog's ears as they walked. Her lips thinned and she snapped her fingers. The dog bounded to her side, and she made him stay at heel the entire next mile. As the path widened, Fenris stepped up to join her.

"Your mabari is excellently bred and trained." He'd seen and fought enough inferior specimens to know. "Why do you not breed him?"

Pleasure and surprise ran through Hawke's tone as she told him that was a good idea. He pressed on, pleased to have broken the silence.

"Between him-"

"Flower," Hawke interrupted.

"Flower?"

She shrugged. "I was eleven."

"Well," Fenris looked for something nice to say about the mabari's name. Hawke seemed to sense his struggle and she shot him a small smile over her lowering shoulder. A shape of pleasure rose from the unseen slosh, and Fenris discovered that he liked to see her smile. He felt his face close over the new feeling, fearing it. Hawke turned her head to the side, looking down at her pet, and her staff swung into his vision. Fenris looked away, reminded of Danarius and Danarius's smiles – the mix of safety and revulsion it had brought him, the way he'd shoved both down to keep his face and voice smoothly impassive. He cleared his throat. "Well, between your mabari, Cabel, and three bitches, you could have a nice small kennel. Two generations of breeding."

Hawke shook her head. "Cabel's sterile," she said. "Too much darkspawn blood."

"Ah."

They continued for a few paces in silence. "It's still a good thought, though," she said. "Perhaps you could imprint one."

Fenris had an image of a full-grown mabari ripping out a magister's throat. "That has an appeal," he said.

After that, he had nothing to say. Eventually, the path narrowed again, and he slowed to let her take lead again. She stopped and turned to him. "So we talk now? That's nice."

Fenris looked away. "It would be a long fortnight otherwise."

"Yes," she said. She touched his elbow lightly, briefly with her fingertips. He flinched, pulling away from her, from the crashing turmoil. He pushed at it as a drowning man pushes at water – unconsciously, without attention to its quality or temperature. "Thank you," she said, feelingly.

"We should move on," he said, stepping around and away from her. He took point, where warriors ought to walk. He may never escape the company of magisters, but he would never follow one again.

* * *

They fought together remarkably well. Though, Fenris corrected himself hastily, they were not exactly outmatched. Not even the pleasure Fenris found in fighting could overcome the monotony of fighting the same enemy again and again. Skeletons rose around them in clustered groups. Hawke rained fire on them. The mabari – Flower, Fenris thought with a combination of amusement and incredulity – did not do much damage, but he tripped and rattled the loose bones, distracting the creatures while Fenris scattered them across the mossy ground. The spiders weren't any more challenging. They were more likely to drop right over them, but Hawke merely froze them. Fenris would shatter one with his sword, and Hawke a second with an ethereal fist. Flower worried at the third until Fenris could go to his aid.

Hawke's robes bulged with venom sacks, elfroot, and mushrooms. The herbs that were so dear in Tevinter grew here like sand blew there. There was little else of value in the ruins. Mahariel had taken the most valuable artifacts during the Blight, and anything she missed had since been scavenged by the semi-annual teams she sent through.

They took their time. There was no rush, and both seemed aware that once the ruins were clear, they'd have no task to occupy themselves. Hawke turned over each pile of rubble, picking such small plants that Fenris wondered if she were leaving enough to grow back. While Hawke collected her herbs, Fenris marveled at Fereldan. Roots grew into the ruin's walls, thicker than a man was tall. Moss and weeds sprung everywhere the light touched and water trickled constantly into deep, clear springs. It was summer in Fereldan, and while Fereldan was never hot, the days were pleasant. It was even more pleasant in the ruins. It took all day for the sun's heat to sink through the stonework, and all night to escape. They woke and worked in bracingly crisp air, and bedded down in snug warmth. If he had been a mabari, Fenris might have defected just for the climate.

In contrast to the landscape, their company was barren. Fenris had thought of nothing new to say to Hawke since that first day, and all the tense silence that he'd wanted to avoid by beginning a conversation had rushed in. Hawke didn't help him. She neither looked in his direction nor spoke to him unless he spoke first. They discussed rations, campsites, and nothing else. So when Hawke spoke in the low, cool basement of the ruins, her voice seemed very loud.

"Look at this."

Fenris crossed to her. On a plaque before them, an elf was depicted in supplication before a large stone altar.

"This is very old," she said, needlessly. Fenris had already seen enough to know that the ruins above to tombs dated to Tevinter's rule. The tombs were older.

"It can stay old," he said, but to his annoyance, they found the pool, jug, and altar a few turns away.

"Why don't you try it?" Hawke suggested.

"Why don't you, if you are curious?"

"I'm not an elf," she said, smilingly. Fenris often nearly forget that he was. So little of his life was specific to his race. "It might matter."

"I'd rather not."

"What if it opens a cache of treasure?" she asked, a gleam in her eye.

"If it does, they would have been foolish to leave instructions for accessing it around the corner."

"Oh come on, Fenris." Hawke ran her hand across the top of the altar, not quite touching it. "It's mundane, if that helps you."

He shrugged and moved to the pool. It helped a lot. More to avoid a conflict than out of real expectation, Fenris bent and dipped the earthen jug into the pool. The jug was smoother and finer than he had expected from the clay. It was almost like the bone china Danarius owned. The water was clearer and warmer than he expected. The jug pulled at his hand as it filled and heavied, and he when stood, water rushed down its sides and over his hands.

Fenris crossed to the altar and set the jug down with a clink that echoed in the empty chamber. Fenris knelt. He had never prayed before. The gods of Tevinter were gone, slumbering in the deepest parts of Thedas, waiting to awaken as monsters. The magisters had their Black Divine, but what they really worshipped was themselves. Fenris had no one to pray to and could think of nothing to pray for beside.

Fenris had only one belief: to do things as well as was possible. One did not become a swordsman of such calibre without that. If he were to pray, he would pray as well as was possible. He breathed deeply, and peered inward. The mess of shapes and impressions rolled under him. They were as the waves had been, moved by forces he could not know. In the privacy of his own mind, Fenris did not flinch. Here, as on the bench with Mahariel, his experience was his own. He knelt for as long as he could kneel, appreciating that Hawke would not interrupt this solitary vigil over his own lost self.

When he stood, his knees had stiffened. He had both the ignorance of a child and the early stiffness of man leaving his prime. He sipped from the jug, and then he returned to the pool. He poured the water back from his standing position, enjoying the burst of sound and the splash on his feet.

Nothing else happened. There was no more wisdom in dead ritual than in sitting on a beach.

"Perhaps you have to be Dalish," Hawke said.

"Perhaps," Fenris said, though he did not believe it. This place predated the Dales. "More likely, time has made it meaningless."

"That's more likely," Hawke admitted.

Fenris could not help it – even this scant praise was like a beam of light thrown over him. It had always been so, with Danarius.

They cleared the rest of the tombs in good order and returned to the first floor. They spent a final night camped in one of the cleanest rooms they'd found so far. Just outside the room, a large crack in the ceiling both let out the smoke and allowed them a view of the cloudless night sky. The stars spun past them. They did not speak much more than they had any other night, but there was a friendlier tone to their silence. They ate a hot meal side-by-side, backs to the fire. Fenris waited for Hawke to finish her meal – he was still too much the slave to stop himself from bolting it – and he took her bowl with his to where the water ran clear from a small brook into the ruins. When he returned, Hawke was still in the same place, her knees drawn under her arms.

"Can I ask you a question?"

"You may," he said, wishing she would not.

"What happened? Danarius..." she trailed off.

"Danarius is dead."

"What?"

Fenris was struck by the depth and resonance of her reaction. In no other person had Danarius's death ran so significant. To the other slaves, it meant another set of preferences to learn. For Fenris, whose entire remembered life had been spent at one man's side, it had been momentous, and it was a great relief to see that feeling reflected by another. He looked with naked gratitude at Hawke.

"He died at the hands of another magister. They quarreled. I do not know what over."

Hawke shook her head very slightly, as if to dislodge something. She asked if he had ran then. The bowls in his hands felt both heavy and weightless. He looked down, assuring himself that they were still there. They were. The spoons spun along their curved edges, wood on wood.

"I did not. I was cowardly, and I returned to his mansion. Eventually, the idea that I could run occurred to me. I did so before the inheritance had been fully squabbled over. I do not know which magister hunts me. Perhaps there are many." He glanced towards her and saw the complicated expression on her face. He did not have the depth of context to understand it, and so he looked away. He slept poorly through his watch and he forgot his dreams, but he woke feeling surprisingly well.

* * *

That day, they walked back into the forest. Hawke took point, and he let her. She was much better and picking the half-hidden trail signs that pointed the way to Bastard's End. Everywhere Fenris looked, all was bewildering profusion. Flower hared happily through the moss and ferns, chasing bugs. Hawke rubbed her arms in the chill of the morning, and Fenris turned an amused eye on her.

"Aren't you from Fereldan?"

She looked at him, open hope on her face. "Did you just remember that?"

"It is common knowledge where the Champion of Kirkwall grew up." It probably was, but Fenris could not remember where he'd heard it. Perhaps at the village. "I just wondered that you are cold."

"You're from Tevinter. Why aren't you?"

"My armour is enchanted. I am kept both warm and cool."

She laughed loudly.

"I fail to see the joke," he said.

"You never told me that before! All the time, I thought you were just impervious to everything."

"I am glad to see that I know one thing about myself that you do not," He looked away, hoping no blush would be visible on his dark skin. He steeled himself. "Enchanted with blood magic, I am sure, just as these markings were carved into me without thought to my pain." Fenris stopped talking. He knew this story – this one story only – so thoroughly, yet it touched so little of him. He was angry, but it was a cold, dead anger, already exhausted. He took a deep breath and started again. "I owe everything that makes me valuable to a man who took everything of value from me. My training. These markings, this armour, my sword. It is an uncomfortable feeling."

"I gave you that sword," Hawke said.

Fenris's guts moved, the unknown shifting under him in a way that made it impossible be sure he was still standing upright. "So some other magister gave it to me. It makes little difference." Fenris heard himself say. It was as if the words had sprung from some other mouth.

"I'm a mage, Fenris. Not a magister." The amusement had leaked from her tone.

"The moment mages – " Fenris started.

Hawke interrupted. "Let's just skip to the summary, shall we? You think that all mages are dangerous, and they are. They need training, and some of them need supervision their whole lives. You think all mages would bleed the world and pour lyrium into the bodies of other men. They wouldn't."

Fenris said nothing.

"Once, you trusted me. For years, you did not turn me in. You were sure of me, you said."

"I wasn't there for that," he said.

Hawke was suddenly blinking fast. "No," she said, after she mastered herself. "I know."

Fenris turned from her, from the grief and the threat of pity.

"Can't you trust your past self, even if you can't trust me?"

Fenris felt hot anger pouring from him, felt the urge to throw something, to watch it break. "I could have been anyone!"

"Fenris," Hawke said. "You are exactly the same. You are not your memories."

Fenris started walking, and Hawke fell in line behind him. She was silent all the way to the village, letting him get them lost and letting him find their way back.

* * *

Hawke and Fenris returned before Mahariel and her group. Hawke thanked Fenris rather formally for his help, and then she turned back to her large dwelling. Several students were already rushing to her. The tall blonde adolescent stepped outside, a pleased half-grin on his face. It irritated Fenris, so he turned from them to the mercenary quarters. He was extremely pleased to find them empty. He did not want rest, exactly, but he wanted to sit alone. Spending time with Hawke was as fraught as spending time with Danarius. He was not used to Hawke's conversation, which was riddled with trap doors that dropped him into the pit of his own ignorance. When Danarius had spoken to him, it had been a contest, a combat in which Fenris was allowed only to block. It had been easy to separate the man's words from his own swirling reactions. Danarius had wanted only to hurt Fenris.

Hawke's talk was a forest that neither of them seemed to know.

Mahariel called for them as soon as she arrived. The Tevinteres were dead, and the Chantry had dropped the bounty on Hawke.

"I bet it was Varric," Merrill said.


	7. Dimly

**Dimly**

**40 Dragon**

**Cook Hill**

* * *

The Chantry may have dropped their bounty on Hawke, but the Tevinters had definitely been looking for Fenris. Mahariel wanted Fenris to be spotted further and further north from Gwaren. Then she would smuggle him back. She thought there were a few Clans that might assist, if she could locate them.

"I'm coming too," Hawke had said. She hadn't left the forest in years and would wait no longer than she had to. Or so she told herself.

"You can't be serious," Carver said, when he heard. He went immediately to find his sister to berate her. Hawke's hair was dripping with some foul smelling concoction that Merrill was smearing over each strand of her hair. "That they're not actively hunting you is no reason to walk into them."

Hawke did not try to stand. Merrill had assured her that the potion would not stain skin in the same way that it stained hair, but Hawke felt unsure. Since she couldn't stare her brother evenly in the eye, she kept hers firmly shut when she responded. "You're not my keeper, Carver."

"You need one," he said.

Hawke did not bother responding. This was about her and him, not about her safety. Carver had loved the circulated pamphlets of her face and the description of her bold tattoos and white hair, with the bounty under it. Each one had been an argument to keeping her here, keeping her home. For once in their lives, Carver could give more than she could, and he did not want to see that ended.

"This dye's too thin," Merrill complained. "I don't know why."

"Will it still work?" Hawke asked.

"I think so. We'll just leave it on a little longer. You might be a lighter brown than I meant."

"Fine by me."

Carver scoffed. "Hair dye isn't going to keep you safe." Hawke did not bother arguing with him. The Chantry had been circulating the same picture of her for so long that Hawke didn't believe anyone even looked at it anymore. Her trail was long cold, and it had never been tracked this far south. Tattoos were more common here than they'd been in Kirkwall, especially amoung mercenaries. What people remembered best about her was her white hair in her young face.

With the hair dye, she might not blend in, but she would no longer scream her identity.

A drop of dye dripped from her bangs onto her ear. Merrill wiped it gently away with a warm forefinger, and Hawke could not quite suppress the shiver that ran through her. Since the patrol, and Fenris's hesitant words, she'd felt on high alert. She was rolling in anticipation, but she had learned long ago to let Fenris call the pace and long ago learned to love it. He was a coil of tense control that fed her interest. She'd loved feeling the internal struggle work through his body when he'd touched her. He'd touched her with passion, and he'd touched her with tenderness. Mostly, he'd touched her very carefully, but there was always the tension, driving him. He'd vibrated when he came near her.

Being near him again woke her. She felt alive in a way that she hadn't felt since getting here. For those weeks between his arrival and his first words to her, she'd watched herself do the things she always did – mix potions, teach lessons, run through her practice – amazed when she heard herself speak and move as she always did. She felt as if she were living two lives: one in action, common and distant. In her mind, she vibrated with hope and history, with longing and with fear. Her imagination ran wildly.

Fenris. Fenris, safe from Danarius, delivered from Minrathous and her own blunders. How could she have failed him? Why did she always fail only when it is was most personal?

Fenris, walking into Fereldan, of all places. Into Mahariel, of all people.

Fenris, new again.

Fenris was always becoming new to her. Newly passionate. Newly formal. Newly sweet. Now he was just new. She had not quite grown used the way his eyes flickered over everything, as if he weren't sure what to look at. She wanted to be sweet for him, but he prickled.

Hawke had spent three years in this tiny hidden village, thinking of him and bearing the defeat. Now she had the chance to walk out of here. There was a lot of good here in the village, and she might come back, but she owed it to herself to see if the world still pulled her.

"You're a lost cause," Carver said, and he left, loudly.

"Sorry," Hawke said to Merrill.

"What for?"

"For upsetting him. Doesn't he take it out on you?"

"No. Why would he?"

* * *

The next morning, Hawke's hair was orange.

"Orange!" the witch cried, her hands reaching to touch it. "Why is it orange?"

Hawke lowered her head so that the shorter woman could paw at it. She pushed it this way and that. It was solidly, flatly orange.

Merrill pouted.

"It's fine, Merrill," Hawke said, her voice carrying to where Fenris was just stepping out of the barracks. "It's probably because my hair is already so light."

"No," Merrill said. "No, I must have done it wrong."

"Well then you can figure it out and do it again when I get back. I might be ready to be a new woman by then anyways."

Carver snorted. "Yeah. Right." The women ignored him.

Everyone else was looking at Hawke, so Fenris felt free to look at her too. People were crowded around her, wishing her well. Mahariel might be their hero, but Hawke was the one they spoke to. The youngest of the mage students had tears in their eyes. Carver glowered at it all.

Hawke must have felt Fenris's eyes on him, because she turned in his direction, the smile she'd given her student still on her mouth. She raised a hand to him in greeting, and many people turned to see who she was waving at.

Fenris turned and slunk back inside barracks. Mahariel was still there, in her ridiculously thin leathers. She had peeled her deerskin gloves off her fingers and was squatting over Cabel, scratching roughly at the muscle on either side the mabari's protruding windpipe. His eyes were closed and he lolled lazily onto one hip.

Fenris was no rogue, but he was accustomed to making himself as little noticed as possible. He hovered near the flap of hide that separated the barracks from this counsel room. Mahariel had an expression as near pleased, as near unguarded as Fenris had ever seen. Her face was bent near the dog's, and she closed her eyes, pressing her forehead to his. Fenris felt a stab of longing and remembered the puppy that Hawke had suggested for him. It would be pleasant, he thought, to be bound to something.

"Why doesn't he come with you?" he asked.

"Cabel?" she said. "Impossible. All Fereldan would recognize the mabari that stood and fought with the Hero on the roof of Fort Drackon. Not so the elf."

Cabel whined, as if he understood. She patted him comfortingly.

"I will be back, my heart," she said. "Stay and watch over Merrill."

Watch over her indeed, Fenris thought, but he kept it to himself.

"You're wearing this," she told Fenris, handing him a deep-hooded black cloak.

"I'll look like a thief," he said.

"Better a thief than a fugitive," Mahariel said. "I don't want you spotted so near here."

Fenris felt the weight of pursuit heavy around his neck, but he wore what he was bid.

* * *

The land leveled out and became bare as they travelled west out of the Brecilian. Fenris was surprised at the intensity of the heat that pressed on them. Under the black cloak, his armour was barely equal to keeping him cool, and he anticipated the evening rains impatiently. They reached Cook Hill just as the clouds were gathering for the evening, and he welcomed the shade and the light drizzle. Mahariel – strong and wood-wise – walked ahead of them, impassive to the rain that fell and beaded on her leathers. Kern was behind her. They both carried bows on their backs and swords on their hips. Hawke was supposed to be walking between Kern and Fenris, and he supposed she was, though she kept dropping further and further back, so that she was barely ahead of him on the widening lane. Flower ran about, thrilled to be on a long walk.

In the distance, a fork of lightning flashed. It was too distant for its sound to carry, but Hawke turned her head towards it, a small smile on her lips.

Cook Hill was little more than a hamlet on the top of a low rise. There was no village wall. The Chantry and the Chantry mill sat at its highest point. A forge stood untended and unlit under an open roof, surrounded by a few little houses. The inn with its little stable stood in the middle of them all. Hawke called Flower from the barn's open door as they passed into the building.

Kern did the talking. Mahariel had brought him as the group's front. He'd been at Bastard's End ever since his sister had accidentally mended their pig's broken leg. He knew South Reach, and he was neither elf nor mage. The barman looked suspiciously past him at the rest. His eyes flicked over Hawke with little interest, but lingered on both elves, especially at Fenris's hidden face. Kern slipped him an extra copper, which the man squeezed thoughtfully in his fist before pointing the way to the inn's two worst rooms. One was tiny, beside the smoky kitchen, and the other in the attic, accessible only by ladder.

Mahariel led them inside the ground-floor room, dropped her pack on the bed and turned to her party. "Kern, Hawke, see what you can rustle up in the tavern. See if the Tevinters have been through."

"Look helpless? Get bought a drink? Sounds fine to me," Hawke said, sounding thrilled. She brushed by Fenris in the small room as she moved to the door.

"Take your mabari," Mahariel said.

Flower perked up and bolted past them to the tavern. Hawke raised a hand in acknowledgement or farewell and was gone, Kern right behind her.

Mahariel turned to the small sideboard in the darkening room. "Wine?"

Fenris hesitated. He had often served wine to Danarius's guests, so the bottle that the warrior held out to him was familiar. He could easily imagine its heft and smooth surface. It held a certain revulsion for him. It felt like the drink of tyrants. Still, here she was, offering it to him, perhaps not as her equal, but as a free man. He nodded his assent.

Mahariel set it on the table and started peeling the wax seal off its top. "During the Blight, a friend of mine once got us both quite drunk in an inn as poor as this one," she said. The wax came off in a long curl. She pinched the top edge of the leather stopper between forefinger and thumb and pulled. The raw leather was stained irregularly. Mahariel took a small swig and handed Fenris the bottle.

Carefully, he put the bottle's edge to his lips. The liquid barely wet his tongue, but the taste of it filled his mouth. Red, ripe, full beyond its volume. It was so perfect, he almost moaned.

"It is a fond memory," Mahariel said, though she sounded rather sad.

Fenris took a larger mouthful, savouring the way it seemed to expand into him. It seemed almost to expand him. He passed Mahariel the bottle, and she took a small sip.

She smiled at him. "Is it good?" she asked.

"I don't know," Fenris replied.

She smiled. "Me neither."

Fenris was embarrassed to see that she drank much less than him, so when she passed it back, he did not drink again. In time, food arrived. Mahariel asked for another bottle of wine. The man peered suspiciously at her, as if he wasn't sure she had the authority to order it, so Mahariel pulled payment from her small purse and handed it to the man. Fenris noticed that she drank little of the first and almost none of the second bottle, but he was soon past worrying about it.

Fenris asked Mahariel about her friend, but he soon found himself describing Tevinter art to a patient and apparently interested Mahariel. He was sitting at the edge of his chair gesturing widely in front of him to indicate the shape and size of a statue of which Danarius had been particularly proud, when the door opened and Hawke came in.

"There's soldiers in South Reach," she said.

"Are you sure?"

Hawke eyed the two dark bottles on the small table and raised an eyebrow. "I had dinner with a merchant whose home is in South Reach. His servant's sister cleans for the Arl, and he said she said that she said that they'd been set to cleaning out the barracks last month. Kern's been buying drinks all round. One of the locals was complaining that the soldiers who'd been through last week had not been so generous. So, yeah, I'm pretty sure."

"Where's Kern now?" asked Mahariel.

"He came across a man who knew his uncle. They're talking."

Mahariel nodded. "We're getting an early start," she said. "I want to be in South Reach by nightfall."

Fenris rose to take his leave. As he did so, he realized that he was quite sore. He had walked further in the last days than he had all in all of his memory.

"Want me to heal that?" Hawke asked.

"No," he said, thoughtlessly.

"Heal it," Mahariel said, without looking at either of them.

Fenris frowned, but Hawke put a hand on his elbow. "Come on," she said. "There's more room in your loft."

Her hand was soft and warm, and it didn't push at him. He did not pull his arm away, and she did not move her hand as they moved wordlessly to the ladder. Fenris went up first. It was not really a room, more a hayloft with a fourth wall added. The room was tall and airy, but only a single small window high on one large wall let any light in. Two beds stood near one another, a long low table between them. Kern was still below, in the tavern.

"You are going to be cold," Hawke said, looking about.

Fenris placed his sword and his gloves on the low table and glanced at the thin blankets. "I will be fine," he said.

"Lay down," she ordered. "Stomach." He did so, feeling the pull of an abused muscle. He kept his face pressed into the thin pillow. "Turn your head to the side," Hawke said, in the same matter-of-fact voice he had heard her use with the blonde boy, warning him to not shock people that annoyed him. The memory irritated Fenris, though he wasn't sure why. He turned his head and felt her hands, small and warm, at the curve of his lower back. She prodded there a moment before moving to the muscles that ran down the back of his left thigh. He hissed in tight discomfort. She moved her hands away. "It is nothing," she said. "You would probably be fine after a night's sleep, but if you're not, tomorrow's walk will make it worse. Do you want me to heal it?"

Fenris hesitated. When Danarius had used his magic on him, the lyrium in his skin had squirmed against it. Still, he did not wish to hold up those who were trying to help him. "Do it," he said. A piece of him was eager to feel her mana, to be reminded of and revolted by what she was.

Hawke did not, as he had expected, place her hands on him again. The only indication that she had done anything was a warming along the borders of his brands. His lyrium did not squirm against her. It leaned into her.

He felt the warm of a dying fire, though there was no fire in the room. He felt calmer, stiller, than he had before. A door in his heart that he had not known was there opened and light poured from it, warm and welcome and familiar. He felt, for a moment, the tangle of limbs arranging themselves in an embrace, of the tight and easy control that guided the mildness of his actions.

He did not jump from the bed. He sank into it, let out a deeper breath than he knew he'd been holding.

"Fenris?" Hawke asked, and it seemed to him that the tones of her voice were more understandable to him. He had never noticed how carefully she spoke to him, offering the words apologetically, as if they might be bombs. "Is that alright?"

He rose and rolled on the bed so that he was facing her. He felt pleasantly warm, and his skin felt easy on him. "Yes. Thank you, Hawke." He reached for her hand. It was still warm from the power she'd been holding in it, and he felt it warm further when her skin brushed his brands. Their palms ran softly against one another, and her lips parted slightly. He dropped her hand, not in alarm or fear, but because it was the right decision. "Good night, Hawke," he said.

"Good night," she said, her voice small in the large, wood room.

Fenris lay awake for a long time, feeling a peace so resonant it rejuvenated him. He chased the memory of the half-remembered warmth and the limbs he knew had been hers, but he did so from this new place of easy calm, as a man with a place to stand. From here, he could see further and farther ahead. When he let sleep have him, he dreamed well.

* * *

_Thanks all for reading, and for those reviews/favourites/follows. Chapter 8 is really short, so I'm posting two chapters tonight. Steamy bits on Thursday._


	8. Skin and Sun IV

**Skin and Sun**

**37 Dragon**

**Kirkwall**

* * *

The stone floor of Hawke's estate was hard, even through the plush carpet. Fenris shifted his weight from one buttock to another, bending and unbending his legs to loosen the muscle and move the blood. His back was pressed against the edge of Hawke's couch. Repositioning the book over the other knee, Fenris returned to his laboured reading. There were few words that he could not make out with time, but even fewer that he recognized at a glance. His reading was much slower than speech, and he often grew impatient. Tonight though, he was reading a history of the dwarven kingdom, and he kept moving through the tome, despite the infuriating pace.

He had never given much thought to dwarves before. In Tevinter, they were outside the system of magister and slave that had so defined him. In Kirkwall, they seemed nothing more than short, mundane humans, but even in the book's dry style, he found their history utterly engaging. He could easily imagine the vast network of interconnected passages, the rising swell of darkspawn, and the retreat to the central places. He lingered over the illuminations of the Deep Roads – their high walls and straight columns were a testament to certain engineering and precise skill. He compared them to the stories Hawke told of the Dark Roads – rotting with disuse and darkspawn. It was compelling.

"Hawke," he said, turning to her to show her a word he did not know.

"I wasn't asleep," she muttered. She shifted, but her eyes would not seem to obey her command to open.

"It's fine," he said.

"What's the word?"

He spelt it.

"Untenable. It means you can't go on."

"Ah."

She was silent, and as Fenris read on, Hawke's breathing settled back into the deep slow rhythm of sleep. Threestone was still foolishly refusing to seal the Deep Roads and cut the losses, when Hawke interrupted. "What's untenable?" she asked, as if she had just defined it. Fenris smiled more openly that he did when anyone was watching. It felt strange, even unobserved.

"The Deep Roads. The darkspawn and the dwarves."

Hawke did not reply, and Fenris twisted on the floor to see that she had fallen back asleep. Her only pillow was her hands, folded under her ear as if in prayer. Her neck lay at a funny angle, and her mouth was slightly open. Fenris glanced through the open door into the dark central room. Even Orana had abandoned her self-assigned duty of being the last to bed. Fenris placed his piece of red ribbon in the book, closed it carefully, and turned back to the sleeping Hawke. He ought to be off. He would be off, he decided, after permitting himself a moment of unwatched observation. One of her fingers curled towards her eye, like a child's. Before he was overcome with tenderness, he touched the back of his hand to her cheek.

"Hawke," he said.

She stirred luxuriously.

"You should go to bed."

She hummed her agreement.

He smiled and stood. "Come on, Hawke."

She reached her hand out to his without opening her eyes. He took it and pulled her to her feet. Her hand was still warm from her cheek, and it still throbbed faintly from the day's spells.

"I have kept you up."

"'s fine," she said.

"Come," he said, quietly, tugging her gently to the doorway.

Just this once, Fenris thought. She followed him readily, letting him pull her along. Flower jumped off the bed as they entered and moved reluctantly to the low, large couch Hawke had built for him. She fell exhaustedly onto the bed in his place. Orana had lit a fire hours ago. It was all embers now, but it still radiated heat. He took her thick blanket and crossed it over her body. She grabbed his hand as he did so and pulled it to her. He sat carefully on her bed, as far from her as his arm was long.

"Fenris," she said, happily.

"Hawke," he said, with equal affection.

"Don't you ever take your armour off?"

Another man would take that as an invitation, Fenris thought, and there was a part of him that wanted to take it as an invitation. He wanted to shuck the sharp ridges of his breastplate and rest here, with Hawke, rather than making the short walk to his mansion and his narrow crumbling bed. But he was not another man, and because he had made her no promises, he would assume no rights.

He leaned across the bed and touched his lips to hers, chastely. Her bed was as comfortable as he remembered, and it smelled of her skin. It was getting harder to remember why he had made her no promises. The guilt that had so dogged him had no story with which to renew itself, so it had, finally, started to fade. All that was left was a lingering sense that the more immediate wrong had been to Hawke herself. That was a guilt he could do something about.

"Soon," he said.

Her eyes opened and searched his. "Why are we waiting?" she asked, very softly, as if she would frighten him.

He touched her face with his fingers. He touched her high brow and smoothed the eyebrow that she raised when someone was being ridiculous, or when she had a good hand and wanted to hide it. He ran a finger down the curve of her nose, and over the skin over her cheekbones. He let his fingers move down her neck, let them trace the small piece of her collarbone visible where her clothes had shifted and rumpled. Her chest rose and fell under his touch. He moved his hand to cup her chin and he touched their lips together again. He lingered, and, very carefully, he moved his lips against hers. Nothing shifted inside him. All was peace and comfort and the tight spring of longing that he had long ago mastered. He leaned back to look at her, but her eyes stayed closed, and no words came to him.

She smiled a little and squeezed his hand with her warm one. Then she shifted away from him in her bed so that she was lying more comfortably. "Are you coming back for breakfast?" she asked, tucking the pillow under her cheek.

"Yes," he said. Since her mother's death, he ate nearly all his meals here.

"I have apples."

"I like apples," he said.

She hummed, sleepily.

"Good night, Hawke."

"Good night," she said. The wrong had been, had always been, to her, he thought. Soon, he thought. Soon, I will have the courage.

* * *

Fenris woke in the loft, feeling content. A single beam of sunlight streamed through the single window, and a single patch of bright light glowed on the rough wood floor.


	9. Skin

**Skin**  
 **40 Dragon  
** **South Reach**

* * *

There weren't only soldiers in South Reach, there were soldiers all along the road to South Reach. Mahariel's mouth pressed thin, and she kept their pace quick.

The road between Cook Hill and South Reach was not long or rugged, but Hawke and Fenris were less accustomed to constant travel than Mahariel and Kern. When they arrived at the inn – bigger, busier, and better than the one at Cook Hill – they were tired. The tightness in Fenris's left thigh had returned twice. Twice, he'd felt Hawke's power pulling at his skin and seeping into his muscle, and twice he'd been reminded of nothing. Still, the sense of peace that had come over him the night before had not left him. It was enough.

Kern was getting their rooms, and Mahariel was standing in the middle of the street, watching the soliders pass by. Hawke was leaning against the inn's front wall. He was aware of her presence, just outside the narrow field of his vision. He was enjoying the lingering sense of peace even as he became accustomed to the idea that it had come from her and from the past that he'd feared. The feeling had helped him find a rhythm in the day's march, and he looked with more ease at the uncertain future. Fenris was not romantic. He did not think that his feeling would make the road ahead smoother, but he did watch its approach with less worry.

"Still sore?" Hawke asked.

"A little," he admitted.

"I can look at it again when we're inside," Hawke said. Fenris did not like speaking to her when he could not see her face, and so he just nodded. He had had a moment's sense of what was happening under her words, and now he felt a little adrift without it. "It's because you take most of your weight on your right leg when you fight," she said.

"We aren't fighting," he pointed out.

"No. We're walking, and your left leg is weaker. You should strengthen it when you have the chance. If you walk off-balance like that, you could hurt your back."

Deep in his hood, Fenris frowned. He'd never had to strengthen before. His training had always sufficed. Strengthening had been restricted to Danarius's oldest guards, the ones trying to put off their demotions to blood-slaves. He remembered the desperation with which they'd thrown themselves into it, the deliberate cruelty with which Danarius had made observations and watched them suppress their panic. He realized that he had let another long pause stretch, and he spoke, not wanting to lapse again into silence. "I have no idea how old I am," he said.

"You're the oldest you've ever been," Hawke said, and he could hear the joke in her voice. He liked it, and he turned his head so that she was between the two edges of fabric that closed the field of his vision. Her eyebrow was up, and so was the corner of her mouth, on the same side. He felt the corner of his mouth go up. "You're older than both Merrill and Mahariel," she said.

"And you?"

"Probably. It's harder for me to compare elves and humans."

Fenris looked away then, and very quietly he asked, "Was I so much the elf in Kirkwall?"

"What? I don't understand what you mean."

Hawke moved closer to him, and he took a breath, happy this time for the impossibility of eye contact. "In Tevinter, eyes would touch on my weapon then slide off me. It was a constant reminder. Here, I can tell that my ears are visible through the hood. Eyes touch them, then my weapon, and then they slide away." Hawke was silent, and he forced his voice back to neutrality. "I hate it," he said, looking again to Mahariel, who didn't seem to notice the way the way people went way around her or they way they eyed her: her tattoos, her weapon.

"Yes," Hawke said. "It was a problem, though you spent most of your time with two mages and a woman who never wore pants. People kinda overlooked you."

"Hmm."

"I don't think you're forty yet," Hawke said. "If that helps."

"And you?"

"Twenty-nine," she said, rather quietly.

"That's alright then," he said.

He felt her finger touch the back of his hand. "It'd be fine if you were a hundred," she said, very softly. Fenris found that he could not imagine her face this time, and he also found that he did not have quite have the courage to look. Instead, he turned his hand and, catching her finger, pulled her hand closer to him. She moved very easily to his side.

"It would not," he said, but he wasn't sure she'd heard.

The inn's door opened in his large blind spot, and he tucked his hand back into his cloak. "Rooms," he heard Kern say.

Again, they had two. One was larger, with a mabari couch in the corner. Flower leapt immediately onto it and began scratching at the course wool pillow, trying to pile it higher. It did not move, but he grinned in doggish satisfaction at his effort and fell enthusiastically onto it. Mahariel was already in the room, standing near the open window and looking out. In the distance, the Chantry rose above the other roofs.

"Right," she said. "Kern, which tavern is nearest the barracks?"

"The Broke Ring," he said, at once.

"Go there first, then where ever you think you can hear the most gossip. I want to know what Anora's up to now."

Fenris blinked to hear the elf call the Queen by her given name, but she pressed on.

"I'm going to the Hahren's. Let's be back by full dark."

"I'll need more time than that," Kern said.

"Twelve bells then, but no later," she said. Turning to Hawke and Fenris, she continued, "Hawke, your pamphlet is still on the Chanter's board. It's old, but I want you to stay here. Need anything, send Flower to find me."

Flower barked agreeably, Hawke nodded, and Mahariel and Kern were gone.

Hawke stared at the back of the door for several beats after it closed. "I hate being useless," she said.

"What's a Hahren?" Fenris asked, feeling out of his element. His fingers went to the cloak's tie, under his chin.

"Leader in an alienage. Mahariel's brought a few of the magical children to the village before their talents were noticed here, so the Hahren knows and trusts her." Probably the girl he had seen tearfully hanging off Hawke's neck had been from the city, Fenris thought. "People will talk about all sorts of things in front of servants. Mahariel is very well informed for an elf living in the forest."

Hawke training young mages. Fenris could imagine worse tutors. Merrill, for example. He thought of Danarius and his apprentices, the cowering fear, the insipid devotion. There had been none of that in Bastard's End, but there were some things Fenris was just not ready to contemplate yet, and Hawke's place as a mage was one of them. With a discipline that he'd won during days and nights of duties he had no desire to remember, Fenris turned his thoughts aside. Soon, he would think about them.

The day's hard march and the moisture in the air had pulled the tie very tight. Hawke crossed to the room to help him. Her fingers touched his, and he moved his hands out of the way. He shrugged to loosen the weight on the knot. The inside of the cloak was oppressively close, unbearable now that he had the option to take it off. The string loosened, and he stepped away from Hawke to take it off. She stayed where she was, holding her hands together in front of her. Air circulated around him.

"Thank you," he said.

"You're welcome."

Fenris had the sense that she was waiting for him to do something, or say something. He cast about but came up with nothing, so he moved to the window, where Mahariel had been standing moments ago. The sun was low, its bottom edge just above the Chantry roof, but in this part of the world, it lingered well past evening and into the night. In fact, Fenris had been sure that the window in last night's loft had never gone completely dark. He heard Hawke move towards him.

"Are you going to turn me in?" she asked, following his line of sight to the Chantry. He could see her now, out the corner of his eye.

"Are you worried?" he asked.

She shrugged broadly, smiling. She was not worried, he was grateful to realize. It would be better if this were not a long conversation, as he didn't know his mind well enough to reassure her for long. "I think you wanted to, when we first met." Fenris felt the chasm of history open again between them. Its murmurs were not as frightening as they had once been, and the waves had less power to rock him, but it was as unbridgeable. "When we first met the first time," Hawke added. "You just needed my help more than you wanted to be rid of me."

"You are helping me again," he said, trying to conquer the gap, the endless plunge.

"Not the same," she said, without any real concern in her voice. "Now I'm just helping Mahariel help you."

"I am not turning you in," Fenris said, turning away from the Chantry to face her more openly. He turned soon enough that he didn't see Kern moving towards its front doors, past the barracks and the tavern nearest them. He would have been hard to see anyway, as the low sun was slanted directly at him. It glowed so brightly that shapes were hard to see. Fenris shifted his weight, leaning off his sore left leg onto the windowframe. "I trusted you once."

"You weren't there for that," she said, in the same gently teasing, encouraging tone.

"I don't think you can realize how unsettling that is," he said, calmly and simply. "I have been listening to you speak all day, and I have had nothing to say to you. I have no stories." A pause. A breath. She waited in the silence, and he decided to tell her. A funny thing happened to the air between them. The groundless dark that he tiptoed over lit up, and the room grew pink. The fall no longer seemed downward, but forward: larger and brighter. He spoke into that bright space, knowing she was in it. "I remembered you, Hawke, very briefly. Your touch, and ... more, but it's gone now. I had no idea how tightly the past had held me, until you touched me and it fell away. I have been feeling it all day and thinking of you."

He reached for her through the space between them and it seemed that she was in his arms even before he touched her hand. He tucked her against him, her head under his chin. She fit easily, as if they had already negotiated the fit of their bodies. He kissed the top of her head. Her orange hair smelt of sun, and he breathed it in. He watched the chasm under him. It moved, but nothing burst from its surface to take him. Nothing rose, shining, to save him. A present peace grew.

"I have very little to offer you," he said.

She said his name so tenderly that he looked down at her. She touched her lips softly to his. A happy sweetness bloomed in the dark slush of fear, and he clung to it. It warmed him, and it was entirely new. He felt entirely new. She moved a little in his arms, almost a shiver, and he opened his eyes to see her almost-yellow ones.

He felt her eyebrow go up in question, and he arched his own in response.

"Fenris," she breathed. "Is this for real?"

"Please," he said, bending eagerly. She met him halfway and he could the smile on her mouth and the willingness in her body. She was so warm and she trembling in his arms. He touched her side, her back, her face, but her hands were already at the buckles of his breastplate. He felt one give, and then the other. He made a noise of surprise.

"I know. I won't," she panted, and his heart groaned. "But your breastplate is really hard."

Her hands went to his other side, and he felt the metal go suddenly slack over his chest. He caught it before it fell, and he laid it gently to the ground. It fit so well that he needed no gambeson, just a thin leather tunic. Her mouth pushed at his and opened almost immediately. He was surprised at her eagerness, at the speed with which she gave herself. Hawke ran her hands down his chest and around his waist. To his belt, which gave at her touch. He was not naked, but he felt nearly so. All the constraining pieces of his clothing were gone, and all that was left was soft, easily moving leather. Between his breastplate and his chest, there was no room, no shift of space, but the tunic moved over him, and it made him feel more aware of his aging body, of the places that were not as tight as they had been on Danarius's young men. As he could feel that they were on her.

"Fenris," she whimpered, and her thighs moved restlessly against his. She pressed the inside of her knee against the outside of his. He felt her hip shift under his hand, opening and turning. His hands moved over her, the tightly held breasts, the ribs, the belly. She had a cord of rope as a belt, and his hands fell to it. Her belly rose and fell and rose, and as it fell again, he pulled the rope away. Her clothes were simply made, but of a fine, soft grey wool. He pulled the fabric tight over her belly and went to his knees, kissing her there.

Her hands were at the uppermost of the claps that ran from his collar to his waist. She flicked each open with a twist of her wrist. When she had gone as far down as she could reach, her fingers curled over the edging and pulled, gently.

"Stand up."

He did as he was told. The clasps continued to come open, one at a time, and Fenris closed his eyes against a pull of fear, and listened to her breathing. Her hands slowed, and his fear receded.

"If you want me to stop, I will. Just say the word. I can wait." Her hands undid the last clasp, dangerously low on his body. He did not say anything or move to stop her. Carefully, she ran her arms under his clothes, around him. The slide of her skin against his naked waist caused him to hiss through his teeth in longing. Her hands moved up the skin of his back, to his shoulders, where they paused in question. He rolled them back in invitation, and she pushed the leather off him. The tunic fell to the floor, and her palms ran down his bare arms to his wrists. Her skin was so pale against his. She pulled his wrists behind her, crossing their arms behind her back and kissing him hard. He gathered her up, pulling her weight onto her toes and against his chest. She was muttering his name between the movements of her lips and tongue.

Her tunic was loose against her body, and Fenris slid his hands inside it, past the wool leggings to the heat of her skin. She arched her back against him, but did not push. He was grateful. He had no misgivings, but he also had no memory of doing this because he wanted to. Her tunic opened at the intrusion of his arms, and he ran his hands to her shoulders, where he pushed the wool from her. It fell, and her breastband quickly followed. Her breast was large in his hand, and he lifted it until it spilled over his fingers. His other hand was pushing the hem of her leggings down, but she was squirming away from him, towards the wall. He moved with her, keeping the space between them closed.

"Fenris," she panted, when her back was nearly at the wall. "I want to touch you." Both hands were at the tie that held his leggings up. It gave as easily as the large braided belt, and she was peeling the leather off him. She was on her knees, stipping. Her right hand was still easing his pants over his foot while her left was stripping his smallclothes off him. Almost before he was naked, she had taken the tip of him in her mouth. Her hands ran up both thighs, and her tongue pushed wetly against him.

"Hawke," he groaned, reaching for her wrists.

She twisted them free, and he felt himself slide out of her mouth. "I want to," she said. Her mouth moved over him again, warm and wet. Her hands touched the back of his knees and ran up the back of his thighs, and he had never wanted anything so much. She took him farther inside, rubbing the head against the inside of her cheek. He put both hands on the stone wall behind her and resisted the urge to push. He did not want to be unpleasant. Her mouth slid up him, taking care to push and suck against the ridge. One hand came around his base to help, and everything was suction and slide. Heat and wet. He felt the edge or release rushing towards him, and he did not want it to end while the extent of his involvement was to not push. He wanted her too much to wait so passively for the wave to crash.

He reached down to take her wrists a second time and did not let her twist away. He pulled up, forcing her to her feet, and pressed both hands against the cold wall above her head. He was much stronger than she was, and he did not worry that she would break loose, even when he trapped both her wrists against the wall in one hand. He pushed her leggings roughly off her hips. He was too tall to take them off completely, but he didn't care. He pressed himself against her body, kissing her swollen mouth roughly. His erection, wet with her mouth, pressed and slide across the skin of her belly, and he found himself pushing against her in short thursts, looking for friction. Her mouth met his in desire, and her body writhed hungrily against his strength.

He turned her towards the nearest table and bent her forward, rough with urgency. He pulled her arms behind her back and pushed her leggings down over her full, human hips and down her legs. She stepped out of them, but before she could spread her legs, he hoisted her off her feet and onto the table, spreading her legs as he did so. She whimpered eagerly, arching and rocking. He wanted to be sure that she was ready and reached between her thighs. His finger slid easily inside her, and she pushed back with a frantic moan. He slipped another finger inside, spreading and readying the way, marveling at her slickness, the degree of her want. His fingers glistened when he pulled them out of her, and he grew rougher, pounding at her with his hand and answering her groan with soft unconscious moans. Then she was pleading with him, saying his name over and over. He moved his hand to her hip and gripped for leverage. Her dark fingers sank into her pale skin, her full human curves. Fenris placed himself at her entrance and shoved hard. She was tight and hot and wet, and he sunk to his root. He pulled out and shoved again. Her arms were still in his strong hand, and he pulled back on them so that her chest rose off the table, and he could see her breasts rock. She turned her head. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. She made small satisfied noises with his each thrust. His edge was close and he plunged into the chaos of his pleasure with a last long push.

When he returned to himself, she was still making small motions against him, despite his large hand handing both her wrists and the sharp edge of wood pressing into her thighs. Fenris would have felt ashamed, but for the eagerness of her breath and the tightness of her muscles.

He eased out of her, and she whimpered. He pulled her gently, towards the bed. "Come," he said, and she came so willingly, it stirred some still-sleeping piece of his heart. She lay on her side, and he settled himself close behind her, hand on shoulder. She pressed back against him, tense and wanting. He wished that he were a younger man for her sake. He ran his hand from shoulder to hip, kissing her where he had first put his hand. He breathed in the smell of skin, baked by the day's exposure. Her hand was already over her pubic hair, sliding their mixed fluids over herself. He moved his hand under hers, their fingers twisting between one another. "How do you like it?" he asked her. His mouth was so near her ear that he could whisper. "Hard?" Her thighs shifted again, and he took her earlobe between his lips.

"Easy," she said, breathlessly. He could tell she was close, and he wanted nothing more than to please her. He pinched her lips together over her wet and swollen clitoris and rolled his fingers in wide circles, slowing with each pass over the most inner, least touchable, part of her. She made such sounds, and moved so enticingly against him that he wished he were a younger man for his own sake. All the rest of his body was hard against her, and he held her twisting body hard against him with his free arm. When she cried and spread her legs, rocking into his hand and closing both her hands over his, when he felt her flood into his hand, when he let one finger rub against her slick opening, when she groaned and ground her fine round ass against him, it was good. When she went limp, when she panted herself into calmness, when she turned so that her nose tucked under his jaw and her arms went around him, he felt good. He wiped them both off gently with the clothes by the wash basin and pulled the blankets over them. Mahariel would figure it out, he thought, and stay with Kern.

"Gos," he said, touching her cheek.

"Call me Hawke," she said.

He kissed all the parts of her that he could reach. "Everyone calls you Hawke," he said, his voice resonant with happiness, even to his own ears.

"No one like you."

"Hawke," he said, tucking her more firmly against him.

"Fenris," she sighed, happily. "Don't go anywhere."


	10. Sun

**Sun**   
  
**South Reach**

**40 Dragon**

* * *

Fenris would have had his weapon in his hand before the door had hit the wall, except that Hawke's fingers were digging, claw-like, into his forearm. Fenris shook her off, annoyed. Hawke blushed as she withdrew her arm. To her credit, he could feel her pushing back the mana that she'd drawn near her when the door had swung open. Also to her credit, she was out of bed more quickly than the elf, heedless of her nudity. Flower was on his feet, shaking himself awake.

"We have to go," Mahariel said.

Hawke's breastband was already on, and she was searching the dark floor for her smalls. She found Fenris's first and tossed them at him.

"Kern never came back," Mahariel said. She was already across the room, pulling the curtains shut against the night. "But it can't be him they're after. Let's go."

It took only moments for Hawke and Fenris to make ready, and only a moment longer for Hawke to fire a quick heal at Fenris. They did this under the bed's quilt so that the blue flash wouldn't be visible at the edges of the window, which the curtain might not completely cover. Fenris wasn't sure why that image made him sad and guilty or why the chasm opened under him. He flailed at it. It was not as deep or dark as it had been before, but it surprised him. Hawke turned from him to their packs, still closed from the previous day's walk. He had not supposed that the act of coupling would have changed this fact about him, but he had also not thought it would return so quickly. Would he never be free? He stood, and Hawke passed him his pack. He groped in the dark for her hand.

"Hawke," he said, in thanks and plea.

She smiled at him with alarming relief and squeezed his hand with both of hers.

"Later," Mahariel snapped, pushing past them through the door.

They did not leave the inn through the front door, but out the window of an empty room and down a rope. They landed in the dusty, dark back street. Mahariel swung the hook free with a clever flick of the rope, and they were off, running east. Mahariel wanted to lose them in the thickening woods, and she did not stop until they reached the edge of the forest. Despite the fact that she was carrying a larger pack and twice as many weapons as the others, she was still fresh-faced. Fenris's leg was only slightly stiff, but his ribs pinched with the effort of breathing. The discomfort and the urgency distracted him into a false sense of composure. The sky behind the trees was just starting to lighten.

"Wait here. I want to hear what I can before you start crashing about," Mahariel said, before plunging into the trees.

Fenris glanced at Hawke. She was brace and panting over her knees, and her face shone pale and sweaty in the dawn's pale light. "Are you alright?" he asked, touching her arm. He couldn't help but touch her.

She smiled through her deep breathes and nodded. "We used to do this sort of thing all the time, you know. I've gotten soft in your absence."

He couldn't help but feel amused and a little happy. He moved his hand to her back and left it there. He hoped it was as comforting as he intended. "We spent a lot of time running from dangers we couldn't name?" He much preferred this flat reference to the past. The trapdoor was there, but he could see it and step around it.

"No, we could usually name them," Hawke amended.

"Was that an improvement?"

"I'll let you know in an hour," she said. Flower interrupted them with a strangled anxious noise, half-whine and half-growl. "Mahariel must have called him," Hawke said.

"I'll follow you," Fenris said, and he did, for the few steps farther that they got.

* * *

Mahariel paused in the semi-light, listening. She heard what a human would call nothing – the leaves rustling like the ocean, the low distant hoot of an owl, a branch snapped by some small creature in the trees. She heard nothing human.

Nothing human but the low voices behind her. Mahariel crept a little farther into the trees, hoping for a little distance and wishing for a little more discretion. Or Cabel. Flower was a good mabari, but not so specifically trained. Cabel knew how to smell for her.

Mahariel had spent her adolescence avoiding humans, and she could do so now, easily. The question was whether could with two humans in tow. Fenris was, in all the ways that mattered at the moment, human. Leaving them in South Reach would have been wrong, but now they'd been given their warning, Mahariel was not sure where her greatest loyalty ought to lie. To the two behind her? To Kern, snatched from the streets? To all those back at Bastard's End? She ran a finger over the smooth rune that she wore on the hand of her sword arm. Dalish morality was alarming simplistic, and growing up amoung them left her completely inadequate to the demands of the world. Dalish goodness pitted against human evil; pity and condescension to the city elves; the neutrality of dwarves. The Dalish simply didn't have a depth of story equal to the rest of the world.

The rune's groove was deep in the hard metal. This was as it had been in the Blight: the right action clear too late.

She turned thoughtfully on the spot, right into a drawn arrow.

"Leliana," she said.

She could see the green legs of a spider behind the archer. It blended perfectly into the mottled green of the night forest.

"I taught you to do that," Mahariel said, meaning both the spider and the ambush. Leliana had always been a fine archer, but it had been Mahariel who'd taught her to stalk. It had been early in the Blight, when the two women had been close. Mahariel had taught the bard to move with the forest. Leliana had more natural ability, but no one had shown her how. By the defense of Denerim, the relationship had worn to thin tolerance, and then Mahariel had woken from the final fight to find that the bard had used the Warden's name to put Anora on the throne. It had needed doing, Mahariel knew, but Alistair had thrown away that crown for Mahariel's life, and Anora and Leliana had snapped it up like street dogs before his tree had even been planted.

"You taught me a lot," Leliana agreed, smiling sadly. "And you are surrounded."

Hawke crashed out of the bush, Fenris at her heels. Flower's hackles went up at the spider.

"Sister Nightingale," Hawke said, no happier about it than Mahariel.

"Champion Hawke," Leliana said. She sounded very pleased, but she did not take her eyes off Mahariel. "Fenris," she added, fondly.

"Have we met?" the man asked, dryly.

* * *

The sun was just bursting over the tops of the trees and into their eyes as Leliana led them into her camp. The camp was small. Two score men and women, all in Fereldan suits, sat dicing, drinking, and attending to camp needs. Most rose nervously to their feet when Leliana came in. She ordered them at ease and directed her guests to her own large tent. A sun and eye shone brilliantly over its entrance in fresh yellow paint. Hawke smiled and entered fearlessly, not because Leliana had finally put her arrow away, but because of the uneasiness of her people. She could fight out of here if she had to.

Leliana's tent was so fine that the Seeker unbuckled her thick boots at the door and slipped her feet into small slippers. The floor was covered in thick carpets, and tapestries hung from the tall canvas roof to create separate rooms within the large space. Hawke went immediately to a large bookshelf, touching the spines gently with the tip of one finger.

Mahariel took an early-season apple out of a bowl on a small side table. "Better than Blight fare," she commented.

"Help yourself, Fenris," Leliana said. The elf tucked an apple into the largest of the pouches on his belt.

"Anora's been helpful," Mahariel added, gesturing out the door, to where Anora's troops stood waiting for the Seeker's commands.

"She has cause," Leliana said.

"Which cause would that be?" Mahariel said,

"I'm not here to squabble over the past." Leliana said, and she turned from her old companion to Hawke. "Her majesty wants to keep her country out of the war."

"This is quite the library." Hawke said in response. It was. She had often wished for many of these exact titles for her students, many of which she'd owned in Kirkwall. They could all read of course, but only so much of the complexity of magical theory was easily communicated by her descriptions. How often her father had gone broke for books like these for her and Bethany. How often Carver had gone without.

"It is, isn't it?" the redhead smiled. "It's not quite as diverse as yours in Kirkwall, but it is useful."

"Very," Hawke said. "Which empty Circles did you plunder? Or are some of them mine?"

"Some of them are yours. The others are from the circles. Fleeing mages don't pack many books," Leliana said, and Hawke was surprised to hear a note of real regret in her voice. "You are welcome to them all. A gift from the Seekers of Truth to the Champion of Kirkwall."

"So what do you want?" Hawke said. "The library. The apples. The elaborate trap. What's the cost?"

"I would like to know the same," Fenris said, his deep voice gravelly.

"I have a proposition for you," the Seeker told Hawke. "Our only cost is that you hear me."

"Oh goody," Hawke deadpanned. "I love it when the villain explains everything at the end."

"I'm not a villain!" Leliana said, a little loudly. "I want you to help save the mages!"

Hawke snorted loudly, in exactly the same way her brother did. "Last I checked, that's what the villains do."

"Please hear me out," Leliana said, gesturing at a chair. Hawke sat. "Most of the templars are dead. The mages are very well fortified at Andoral's Reach. Their spells have better range than the templars' smites. They're doing well, but they're poorly provisioned. They're desperate and dying, but they're not surrendering. We have some people on the inside, and we think we can make a deal, if it's presented the right way. We think you're the right way."

Hawke felt two things while she considered Leliana's open, earnest face. The same two things she'd felt every time Mahariel or Carver came back with news.

She remembered her father telling to keep her head down. She remembered her father staring at her accusingly, with one arm around each of the twins, having just caught her trying to move lightning into the shape of a G. She remembered him telling her to keep what you had safe. She glanced at Fenris's closed resentful face and wanted to keep him safe. She remembered her young students back at Bastard's End, where they lived free of all this politicking. She felt the compulsion to keep that as it was.

And she felt her mana moving in her hands. She had that in common with Anders: their power wanted to move to justice. She palmed and rolled the formless, heatless mana in her hands as a warrior might thumb a pommel. She was a better mage and a braver person than her father had been, and the thought of safety made her feel as she had felt then, confronted with her younger siblings in a storm: suffocated.

"We blew an agent in Tevinter just to find you." Leliana added.

"Tevinter!" Fenris exploded.

"Tevinter," Leliana confirmed, looking at the elf. "To kill your master. We hoped you might lead us to Hawke, or that Hawke might find you."

"I had no memory of Hawke."

"I know," Leliana said pityingly. Fenris narrowed his eyes and moved out of reach of her arm. "It was in the Maker's hands. Perhaps he has not abandoned us as completely as some think. We thought Hawke might be in Fereldan, so we killed Danarius and paid the captain of a ship bound for Gwaren. We intended a merry and loud chase, hoping to draw her out."

"You that told the slavers where I went," he spat. "Wasn't your Chantry built on a woman who opposed magic and slavery?"

Leliana bit her lip. "We can't bring down Tevinter, Fenris."

Fenris made a loud noise of disgust. "You could have brought Danarius down, and you chose not to until it suited you."

"Danarius is not the worst person in Tevinter," Leliana said.

"One less magister is not a worthy enough goal in itself?"

Leliana was quiet, and Hawke felt all the callowness of Fenris's remark, all the narrowness of experience it implied.

"What's the deal?" Hawke asked. She felt as she had always felt in Kirkwall: that she was one major victory from peace, from stability. From a better, safer home than she'd had before. She knew what always followed her ambition: fire, screams in the distance, bodies in the street. Still, it had its pull.

Leliana beamed.

"We're just talking," Hawke warned.

Leliana kept smiling, as if Hawke had already agreed. "What have you been doing the last three years?"

"Hiding."

"Teaching," Leliana corrected. "Did you know that you are effectively the senior enchanter of the only standing Circle outside Tevinter? That you haven't had a single problem with blood magic or possessions or escapes and that you've only got one templar? Mages seek you, and their parents seek you. That's all we're proposing. Small circles near new and willing villages. Clinics in major cities. A position or two in clinics and armies for mages who qualify. Fereldan will be the experiment, and you will lead it."

"Qualify how?"

Leliana waved her hand. "Some sort of panel. No harrowing."

Leliana's yellow sunburst caught Hawke's eye. "Those that don't qualify?" she asked.

"Stay in the Circles."

Hawke pursed her lips and leaned back in her chair. "If I agree, and I'm not saying that I am, you don't get my blood. And I get to chose the templars I work with."

Hawke did not quite believe the Seeker when she agreed.

* * *

Hawke and Fenris were given their own tent. It was not as grand as Leliana's, but the Seeker had her soldiers bring Hawke's books by the armful and stack them carefully on the large desk. There was a deep copper tub in the corner, and a wool mattress laid over crates. Hawke had never camped in such grandeur and exclaimed over everything before sitting to examine the books the soldiers brought. Fenris had, and the comparison of this Chantry splendour and Danarius's wealth made him uncomfortable.

Fenris did not believe in the Maker. Nor did he believe that his memory that had brought him here. Once, during Leliana's talk, he had peered through the trapdoor and tried to make out the shapes in the darkness. He had thought he saw Hawke's face, but he had probably only seen what he expected to see. Memory was like that. He had not remembered anything before Hawke's touch, and even after, he remembered nothing so specific as where she might have fled to. His past was irrevocably lost, and there was no Maker. There was nothing but people in power, doing with him as they liked. He reached for the nearest item and toyed with it, trying to avoid the rising swell of resentment.

"This is the last," a squire told Hawke as she took books from him arms. She cooed over a title.

"Thank you," she said, not looking at his face. The boy bowed and was gone. The tent flap had barely fallen closed behind the guard when Hawke was in his arms. "You're still here," she said, a little breathlessly.

He kissed her chastely. He was still here. There had been a moment in the Seeker's tent, when the women's conversation had slid so smoothly from Danarius to the future that he had contemplated leaving. It had not been him that the Chantry wanted. It had not been Leliana's side that he had contemplated joining. But where would he go? The only piece of a story he had with which to build a future was here, in his arms. "Did you doubt me?" he asked, exaggerating wildly in his calm, collected tone. It seemed the sort of thing a lover might say.

"Well," she hesitated. "Frankly, yes."

He let his grip loosen. "Why?"

"You've done it before."

He suddenly wondered if the frank discussion of the past was preferable after all. She tightened her grip around him as he started to let her go. It was not a good feeling, and he extracted himself from her arms, pretending to be interested in the titles on the table. He picked up the book she had exclaimed over, and while he studied it, he entirely missed her proud expression.

He did not miss the easier tone of her voice when she spoke again. "Look, Fenris. How are we supposed to talk about a past that I remember and you don't? Should I never say anything?"

He shut the book, which he could read but not understand. It was a comparative study of how primal and elemental mages described their interactions with the fade. Apparently the two schools had less in common than the schools of creation and entropy, which was – apparently – surprising.

"I won't talk about it if you don't want me to," Hawke said. "We can be new to each other."

"We are not new to each other," he said, knowing it was true and finding a piece of stable footing in saying it.

She smiled a very full smile. "No," she said.

He crossed the tent to stand near her. "Just," he hesitated. "Warn me when you're going to tell me the ways in which I've failed you."

"Fenris," she said, taking his hand. "You have never done anything that made me love you less."

He did not believe her, but he let it pass. The warmth of her hand in his was enough, for now, and her ran his long fingers over hers. The rest they would have to navigate.

"So," she said. "Mages and templars. Again."

He made a low, noncommittal noise.

"I don't want anything that would make me lose you again." At his glance, she continued, "Besides, things often go really badly when I try to save them." She spoke lightly, but Fenris heard the warring undertones in her words and in her eyes. She was not new to him, after all.

He touched her bare arm with his free hand. The sun was fully above them now, and Hawke's skin glowed with the greenish light of their tent roof. He took her face into both hands and tilted his head to touch his lips again to hers. The happy sweet feeling bloomed again, and the slosh around it was neither so dark nor so cold. He thought he could sense a future in it. "I will not lend the mages my sword," he said. "But I will walk gratefully with you where you wish to go, and I will keep you safe if I can."

* * *

_a/n: Sorry for the delay. The chapter was less ready than I thought._

_Complete, for now._


End file.
